Anti-nuke body wins Nobel Peace prize

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has been awarded the 2107 Nobel Peace prize.

The Geneva-based organisation, seeking to eliminate atomic weapons through an international treaty-based prohibition, won the USD 1.1 million prize 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.

Norwegian Nobel Committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said that ICAN "has been a driving force in prevailing upon the world's nations to pledge to cooperate ... in efforts to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons."

"It is a great honour to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 in recognition of our role in achieving the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This historic agreement, adopted on 7 July with the backing of 122 nations, offers a powerful, much-needed alternative to a world in which threats of mass destruction are allowed to prevail and, indeed, are escalating," ICAN said in a statement.

"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," the statement added.

The prize comes amid heightened tensions over both North Korea's aggressive development of nuclear weapons and United States President Donald Trump's persistent criticism of the deal to curb Iran's nuclear programme.

Image: India's surface-to-surface missile, the Prithvi. Photograph: Kamal Kishore/Reuters.