A Nobel for no more nukes

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize last week to a group that worked on an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons, while acknowledging that the treaty would not in itself eliminate a single nuclear weapon. So why the award?

The winner, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, promoted talks at the United Nations that resulted in a treaty banning the development, ownership or use of all nuclear weapons. But the nations that actually possess such weapons, including the United States, boycotted the effort. The American argument, hard to dispute, is that the United States cannot easily abandon nuclear weapons when countries like North Korea are making them and threatening to use them.

To which the Norwegian committee’s response, based on the history of the prize, would be that the more elusive the goal, the more important it is to encourage those trying to reach it. Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 for championing a League of Nations his country never joined; the 1927 Prize was shared by French and German diplomats who worked on “Franco-German reconciliation”; in 1995 it went to Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences for “their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics.”

However quixotic their goals, these were the “champions of peace” Alfred Nobel envisioned in his will. And there were laureates whose causes were arguably advanced by the prize, like Lech Walesa of Poland and Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. There were also awards that raised eyebrows, such as those to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho (who refused it), or Jimmy Carter — or the prize bestowed on Barack Obama a scant nine months after he took office. Questions were raised last year when the prize went to President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia for a peace agreement his countrymen rejected before the prize was announced. But Mr. Santos has not given up on securing peace, and that is what the committee encouraged and honored.

There is bound to be controversy over any award that looks for champions of peace in that complex zone between reality and the ideal. In her arguments against American participation in negotiations on the nuclear ban last March, Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters, “There is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons. But we have to be realistic.”

We are realistic, the Nobel Committee declared, in effect — we do not expect that this award will eliminate nuclear weapons. But, reversing Ms. Haley’s argument, that is all the more reason to encourage those who seek a world with no nuclear weapons.