This year's Nobel Peace-Prize selection is a rebuke of Trump

The head of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said Trump's election is a crisis

Published October 6, 2017 4:14PM (EDT)

 (Getty/Drew Angerer/KREMLL/Salon)
(Getty/Drew Angerer/KREMLL/Salon)

After the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the Nobel Peace Prize, the head of the organization had a blistering response to President Donald Trump, who she said has a history of "not listening to expertise."

"The election of President Donald Trump has made a lot of people feel very uncomfortable with the fact that he alone can authorize the use of nuclear weapons," Beatrice Fihn, the group's executive director told reporters in Geneva, according to the Guardian.

She added, "There are no right hands for nuclear weapons."

Trump has engaged in a war of words, largely over Twitter, with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and recently undermined Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's attempts to lower the tensions and engage in potential negotiations — also over Twitter.

On Thursday night standing in a room with military officials and their spouses, he told reporters that it was "maybe the calm before the storm."

The cryptic message left many wondering what actions he planned to take, if any. His overall incendiary rhetoric has helped push the Doomsday Clock to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the closest its been since the early 1980's, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

But Fihn isn't only directing her words at the president, she's calling for the abandonment of nuclear weapons entirely. "We can’t threaten to indiscriminately slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians in the name of security," she said, according to the Guardian.

ICAN received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of its efforts "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," Norwegian Nobel committee chairman, Berit Reiss-Andersen, said.

Trump has also stoked tensions with Iran after lambasting them during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly, and with his plan to decertify the nuclear deal that was a landmark achievement of the Obama administration.


By Charlie May

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