The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize went to the International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for the group’s work on behalf of a global
ban on nuclear weapons. Just a few months earlier, two-thirds of the U.N.’s
General Assembly approved the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. “The
risk of nuclear war has grown exceptionally in the last few years, and that’s
why it makes this treaty and us receiving this award so important,” Beatrice
Fihn of the group said.[1]
Unfortunately, the stance to ban rather than merely limit nuclear weapons was
already being marginalized as utopian and even potentially counter-productive
even though ongoing efforts to limit the proliferation were falling short. I
submit that the international system itself had become problematic, given the
relatively new global threat of nuclear war.
1. Michael
Birnhaum of the
Washington Post, October 6, 2017.
The full essay is at "A Ban on Nuclear Weapons."
