ANTI-NUCLEAR WEAPONS CAMPAIGN AWARDED NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
ICAN warns of ‘urgent threat’ as N. Korea-US crisis escalates
OSLO
THE Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded yesterday to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) here, as its representatives warn of “an urgent threat” over USNorth Korea tensions.
“We are facing a clear choice right now: the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us,” ICAN head Beatrice Fihn told a news conference here on Saturday.
As a coalition of hundreds of non-governmental organisations around the world, ICAN has worked for a treaty banning nuclear weapons, adopted in July by 122 countries. Although historic, this text is weakened by the absence of the nine nuclear powers among the signatories.
In an apparent snub of the ICAN-backed treaty, the three Western nuclear powers — the United States, France and the United Kingdom — will be represented by second-ranking diplomats rather than by their ambassadors at the ceremony.
But several survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, which killed more than 220,000 people 72 years ago, attended the event.
Calling tensions between the US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un “an urgent threat”, Fihn was alarmed by the risks of a new nuclear disaster. “I strongly urge these two leaders to back down from this threat, stop threatening to use weapons of mass destruction to slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians, engage in diplomatic solutions and work for the elimination of nuclear weapons,” Fihn said.
“The world is becoming ... a more dangerous place to live,” said Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow who, alongside Fihn, received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of ICAN.
Thurlow was 13 when an atomic bomb exploded in her city on Aug 6, 1945. Now an 85-year-old Canadian resident, Thurlow continues to campaign against weapons of mass destruction.
“This is unacceptable human suffering,” she said.
“No human being should ever experience what we experienced.”