The campaign to ban nuclear weapons

Leader of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN),

Beatrice Fihn, right, congratulates fellow Nobel peace prize winner Setsuko Thurlow 

in Oslo on Sunday. (Nobel Prize/YouTube)

A body, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), has been awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize by a committee that cited the spread of nuclear weapons and the growing risk of an atomic war.

ICAN is a coalition of 468 grassroots non-governmental groups that campaigned for a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by 122 nations in July.

Not surprisingly, the treaty is not signed by — and would not apply to  — any of the states that already have nuclear arms.  However, Beatrice Fihn, ICAN's executive director, urged them to sign the agreement.

Her position is that the campaign would go a long way to prevent ''the end of us.''

The leader of ICAN, Beatrice Fihn, signs the Nobel protocol next to campaigner and 

Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow in Oslo, Norway on Saturday. (Audun Braastad/NTB 

Scanpix/via/Reuters)

Speaking at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, the ICAN leader said, "It provides a choice. A choice between the two endings: the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us," 

She counselled the leading nations in the arms race: "The United States, choose freedom over fear. Russia, choose disarmament over destruction. Britain, choose the rule of law over oppression."  She also urged France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel to do the same.

She continued, "A moment of panic or carelessness, a misconstrued comment or bruised ego, could easily lead us unavoidably to the destruction of entire cities."

"A calculated military escalation could lead to the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians."

Fihn delivered the Nobel lecture together with Setsuko Thurlow, an 85-year-old survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and now an ICAN campaigner.

Thurlow, now a Canadian who lives in Toronto, recalled on stage on Sunday some of her memories of the attack on Aug. 6, 1945.  She was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building about 1.8 kilometres from Ground Zero, she said. Most of her classmates, who were in the same room, were burned alive.

"Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen," she said.

"Parts of their bodies were missing. Flesh and skin hung from their bones. Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out. The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the air.