Global campaign supporting nuke ban wins Nobel Peace 2017

The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winner is an International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons(ICANW). The campaign is a joint effort of NGOs from over 100 nations.

The Norwegian Nobel committee that chooses the Nobel Peace Prize winner, choose ICANW after going through more than 300 nominations. The prize announcement in the Norwegian capital Oslo, culminates a week in which Nobel laureates have been named in medicine, physics, chemistry and literature.

The Nobel Committee bestowed the honour on ICANW, a group based in Geneva, “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”

ICANW has been mobilizing a civil society, and making efforts to get nuclear weapons banned under international law. The Nobel Committee emphasized that “the next steps towards attaining a world free of nuclear weapons must involve the nuclear-armed states”.

If ICANW succeeds in its efforts, all nuclear-armed nations from across the world will have to eventually dump around 15,000 nuclear weapons in total.

ICAN that started off in Australia, was formally launched in Vienna in 2007. Today, it is present in over 100 nations.  A spokeswoman for ICANW said the organisation was elated about the win. “It is great recognition for the work that the campaigners did throughout the years and especially the Hibakusha,” the spokesperson said, talking about the atom bomb survivors in Japan.

In July this year, 122 nations agreed to a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. However, nations with nuke arsenals, including the US, Russia, China, Britain and France refused to be a part of the group.

The Nobel Prize is proof that that the committee is keen on the case of disarmament amid rising nuclear friction between the US and North Korea. Also, the fate of a 2015 deal between Iran and major powers to limit Tehran’s nuclear programme is in limbo.