Peace prize given to anti-nuke group
Nobel award seen as message to U.S. and North Korea.
TheNobel OSLO,NORWAY—
Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the International CampaigntoAbolishNuclear Weapons, a group of mostly young activists pushing for a global treaty to ban the cataclysmic bombs.
The award of the $1.1million prize comes amid heightened tensions over both North Korea’s aggressive development of nuclear weapons and U.S. President Donald Trump’s persistent criticismof the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
The prize committee wanted “to send a signal to NorthKorea andtheU.S. that they need to go into negotiations,” Oeivind Stenersen, a historian of the peace prize, told The Associated Press. “The prize is also coded support to the Iran nuclear deal. I think thiswas wise because recognizing the Iran deal itself could have been seen as giving support to the Iranian state.”
The Geneva-based ICAN has campaigned actively for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by 122 countries at the United Nations in July. On Sept. 20, the first day the treaty was open for signature, 51 countries signed it and three submitted their ratifications. The treaty needs 50 ratifications to go into force, which advocates are confident will happen.
TheUnited States, Russia, Britain, France and China all boycotted the negotiations; India, Pakistan and North Korea did not vote.
ICANalsoorganizedevents globally in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversaries ofWorld War II’s devastating U.S. atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Last month in Berlin, ICAN protesters teamed up with other organizations to demonstrate outside theU.S. and North Korean embassies against the possibility of nuclear war between the two countries.
The prize “sends a message to all nuclear-armed states and all states that continue to rely on nuclear weapons for security that it is unacceptable behavior. We will not support it, we will not make excuses for it. We can’t threaten to indiscriminately slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians in the name of security. That’s not how you build security,” ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn told reporters Friday in Geneva.
She said that she “worried that itwas a prank” after getting a phone call just minutes before theofficial Peace Prize announcement was made. Fihn said she didn’t believe it until she heard the nameof the groupbeing proclaimed on television.