Effort to abolish nuclear arms worldwide garners Peace Prize
BRUSSELS — An international group dedicated to eliminating nuclear weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a recognition of efforts to avoid nuclear conflict at a time of greater atomic menace than any other period in recent memory.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was honored for its work to foster a global ban on the destructive weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.
The scrappy civil-society movement was behind a successful push this summer for a U.N. treaty that prohibits nuclear weapons. It promotes nuclear disarmament around the world.
The award comes amid rising global alarm about a potential nuclear conflagration. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has hurled threats of nuclear missile
strikes against the United States, and President Donald Trump has warned he could “totally destroy North Korea” if provoked. The barbed exchanges have raised fears among many global leaders of a miscalculation that could end in cataclysmic conflict.
“The risk of nuclear war has grown exceptionally in the last few years, and that’s why it makes this treaty and us receiving this award so important,” Beatrice Fihn, the Swedish executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, said in a telephone interview. “We do not have to accept this [risk]. We do not have to live with the kind of fear that Donald Trump could start a nuclear war that would destroy all of us. We should not base our security on whether or not his finger is on the trigger.”
ICAN recognizes that nuclear weapons will not disappear any time soon. But Ms. Fihn said a ban is still a realistic long-term goal, similar to the way an international taboo was created around the use of chemical weapons.
“Keeping nuclear weapons legal isn’t going to help things,” she said.
The decade-old Geneva-based coalition, which was modeled on international efforts to ban land mines, has branches in more than 100 countries.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was approved by two-thirds of U.N. members in July, but it has not attracted support from any of the world’s nine nuclear powers. The United States and others boycotted the U.N. discussions that led to the treaty.
Nuclear powers around the world repeated their opposition to efforts to ban the weapons following the Nobel announcement Friday.
The White House and leaders of other nuclear powers have instead endorsed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which limits but does not ban the powerful weapons.
Signatories to the prohibition treaty would be banned from developing, testing and possessing nuclear weapons, as well as threatening to use them. The treaty will go into effect once 50 nations ratify it. Guyana, Thailand and the Vatican were the first three to do so.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee recognized ICAN for “its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its groundbreaking efforts to achieve a treatybased prohibition of such weapons,” chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen of Norway said as she announced the prize in Oslo.
“There is a popular belief among people all over the world that the world has become more dangerous, and that there is a tendency where we experience that the threats of nuclear conflict have come closer,” Ms. Reiss-Andersen said.