Anti-nuclear arms group’s efforts lauded
OSLO, Norway — The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a group of mostly young activists pushing for a global treaty to ban the cataclysmic bombs.
The award of the $1.1-million prize comes amid heightened tensions over both North Korea’s aggressive development of nuclear weapons and President Trump’s persistent criticism of the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
The prize committee wanted “to send a signal to North Korea and the U.S. that they need to go into negotiations,” said Oeivind Stenersen, a historian of the peace prize. “The prize is also coded support to the Iran nuclear deal. I think this was 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, 50 countries signed it and three submitted their ratifications. Three more countries have since added their names. ICAN hopes to get the 50 ratifications by the end of 2018.
The United States, Russia, Britain, France and China all boycotted the negotiations; India, Pakistan and North Korea did not vote.
ICAN also organized events globally in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversaries of World 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 the U.S. and North Korean embassies against the possibility of nuclear war between the two countries. Wearing masks of Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, protesters posed next to a dummy nuclear missile and a large banner reading “Time to Go: Ban Nuclear Weapons.”
The group “has been a driving force in prevailing upon the world’s nations to pledge to cooperate ... in efforts to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons,” Norwegian Nobel Committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said in the announcement.
The prize “sends a message to all nucleararmed 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 it was a prank” after getting a phone call just minutes before the official Peace Prize announcement was made. Fihn said she didn’t believe it until she heard the name of the group being proclaimed on television.