Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Group Opposing Nuclear Weapons
In a year when the threat of nuclear warfare seemed to draw closer, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to an advocacy group behind the first treaty to prohibit nuclear arms.
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 treaty-based
prohibition of such weapons,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a
statement.
The choice amounted to a blunt rejoinder to the world’s nine nuclear-armed powers and their allies, which boycotted the negotiations. Some denounced the treaty as a naïve 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 United Nations
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.
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.
The
committee acknowledged the view held by nuclear-armed countries in its
statement, noting that “an international legal prohibition will not in
itself eliminate a single nuclear weapon, and that so far neither the
states that already have nuclear weapons nor their closest allies
support the nuclear weapon ban treaty.”
Despite
those admonitions, 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. While only three — Guyana,
the Vatican and Thailand — had formally ratified the treaty as of
Friday, others are expected to do so in the coming year.
The treaty will go into effect 90 days after 50 United Nations member states have formally ratified it.
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.”
The
prize came as a surprise to Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of
ICAN, which has a three-person office in Geneva. She said at a news
conference that she had thought at first that the congratulatory
telephone call from the Nobel committee was fake.
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,” Ms. 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 United Nations sanctions
prohibiting his isolated country’s repeated nuclear weapons and missile
testing, and has threatened to strike the American heartland with the
“nuclear sword of justice.”
President Trump, who has mocked Mr. 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 that the award was not intended to send a message directly to
Mr. 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.
Ms.
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.”
There
was no immediate reaction to the prize from the Trump administration or
from North Korea. But in Moscow, Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, told reporters that “there is no
alternative” to nuclear parity to maintain world stability.
Jens
Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, who has strongly criticized
the nuclear weapons treaty, said in a statement quoted by news agencies
that he welcomed “the attention given to the issue” of nuclear weapons
by the Nobel committee’s choice, but he reiterated his view that the
treaty had put years of nonproliferation efforts at risk.
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
same strategy was used by proponents of the treaties that banned
chemical and biological weapons, land mines and cluster bombs.
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
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.
Besides
North Korea, Russia and the United States, the other nuclear-armed
states are Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.
The
United States had leaned hard on its allies, especially non-nuclear
powers, to boycott the treaty talks that began at the United Nations
earlier this year.
Russia and China are equally opposed to the efforts to ban nuclear weapons through an international treaty.
But on this issue, the naysayers are in the clear minority.
The
United States was also isolated in 1997, when the Nobel Peace Prize was
awarded to a civil society group that pushed to abolish land mines —
the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its coordinator, Jody
Williams.
The
international agreement that her group pushed for, the Convention on
the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of
Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, known simply as the Mine
Ban Treaty, has been signed by more than three-fourths of all countries
around the world. The United States, Russia and China remain outliers.
It is unusual for organizations to receive the prize. Others have included the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Who won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize?
■
President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia was honored for pursuing a
deal to end 52 years of conflict with the leftist rebel group known as
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the longest-running war in
the Americas, just five days after Colombians rejected the agreement in a shocking referendum result.
