Nuclear treaty earns Nobel
Activists working to ban weapons win Peace Prize
In a year when threats from nuclear weapons seemed to draw closer, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to an advocacy group behind the first treaty to prohibit them.
The group, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a Geneva-based coalition of disarmament activists, was honored for its efforts to advance the negotiations that led to the treaty, which was reached in July at the United Nations.
“The organization is receiving the award 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,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement.
The choice amounted to a blunt rejoinder to the world’s nine nucleararmed powers and their allies, which boycotted the negotiations. Some denounced the treaty as a naive and dangerous diversion.
It also represented a moment of vindication for the members of the winning organization, known by its acronym ICAN, and for the U.N. diplomats who were
responsible for completing the treaty negotiations.
“This prize is a tribute to the tireless efforts of many millions of campaigners and concerned citizens worldwide who, ever since the dawn of the atomic age, have loudly protested nuclear weapons, insisting that they can serve no legitimate purpose and must be forever banished from the face of our earth,” ICAN said in a statement.
Event ‘gives hope’
The United States, which with Russia has the biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons, had said the treaty would do nothing to alleviate the possibility of nuclear conflict and might even increase it.
At least 53 member states of the United Nations have signed the treaty since a ceremony to start the ratification process was held at the General Assembly on Sept. 20. Delegates representing two-thirds of the General Assembly’s 193 members participated in the treaty negotiations.
“We have received this news with so much joy,” Elayne Whyte Gómez, the Costa Rican ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, who was the chairwoman of the negotiations, said in a telephone interview. “Every year there should be at least one happy event to give us hope, and this was it.”
She said ICAN’s work “represented efforts by civil society activists who approached governments around the world and maintained the momentum of the negotiations to keep them going.”
Dr. Ira Helfand, a disarmament activist and board member of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, one of ICAN’s founders, called it “a powerful voice reminding us all of the urgent need to ban and eliminate these weapons as the only reliable way to make sure they are not used.”
The prize came as a surprise to Beatrice Fihn, executive director of ICAN, which has a threeperson office in Geneva. She said at a news conference that she had thought at first that the congratulatory phone call from the Nobel committee was fake.
‘Really inspired’ moment
The treaty will go into effect 90 days after 50 U.N. member states have formally ratified it. As of Friday, three — Guyana, the Vatican and Thailand — had done so.
Under the agreement, all nuclear weapons use, threat of use, testing, development, production, possession, transfer and stationing in a different country are prohibited.
For nuclear-armed nations that choose to join, the treaty outlines a process for destroying stockpiles and enforcing the countries’ promise to remain free of nuclear weapons.
“I don’t think we have unrealistic expectations that tomorrow nuclear weapons will be gone,” Fihn said. “But I think this is really a moment to be really inspired that it is possible to do something.”
The prize came against the backdrop of the most serious worries about a possible nuclear conflict since the Cold War, punctuated by a bellicose standoff between the United States and North Korea. The North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, has defied U.N. sanctions prohibiting his isolated country’s repeated nuclear weapons and missile testing, and he has threatened to strike the U.S. heartland with the “nuclear sword of justice.”
President Donald Trump, who has mocked Kim by calling him “Little Rocket Man,” has said he would have no choice but to “totally destroy” North Korea if the United States or its allies are attacked.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told reporters the award was not intended to send a message directly to Trump. “We’re not kicking anyone in the legs with this prize,” she said. The committee instead intended to give “encouragement to all players in the field” to disarm.
Fihn was more direct in her appraisal of the Kim-Trump standoff and the anxieties it has raised. “Nuclear weapons do not bring stability and security,” she told reporters. “We can see that right now.”
Proponents of the treaty have said that they never expected any nuclear-armed country would sign it right away. But they argued that the treaty’s widespread acceptance elsewhere would increase the public pressure and stigma of possessing nuclear weapons.
The coercive power of such public shaming, treaty supporters said, eventually would lead the holdouts to change their positions and disarm. The same strategy was used by proponents of the treaties that banned chemical and biological weapons, land mines and cluster bombs.
Weapons defy containment
Nuclear weapons have defied attempts to contain their proliferation since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, which led to Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II.
The unspeakable destruction wrought by those weapons laid the foundation for the nuclear arms race and the doctrine of deterrence, which holds that mutually assured destruction of nuclear-armed antagonists is the only way to prevent an attack.
Proponents of that doctrine contend it has basically kept the peace for more than 70 years.
Besides North Korea, Russia and the United States, the other nuclear-armed states are Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.