The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to ICAN (International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons) in Oslo, Norway on Dec. 10th, Human Rights Day.
You can watch the entire ceremony here.
Beatrice Fihn, executive director of ICAN, and Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing (Hibakusha), delivered powerfully moving acceptance speeches. They challenged the nuclear weapons states, and states living under the so-called "nuclear umbrella," to abolish nuclear weapons, before they abolish us.
The transcripts of both speeches are viewable here:
Setsuko Thurlow: https://www.wagingpeace.org/setsuko-thurlow-nobel-peace-prize-acceptance-speech/
Beatrice Fihn: https://www.wagingpeace.org/beatrice-fihn-nobel-peace-prize-acceptance-speech/
Beyond Nuclear organized a live watch party in Roswell, New Mexico (where we were fighting highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel de facto permanent parking lot dumping) at 5am local time.
Beyond Nuclear has also been honored to speak (about Fukushima) alongside Thurlow at a Washington, D.C. Hiroshima-Nagasaki Peace Committee August 6 & 9 commemoration, held at the Japanese Internment Camp memorial on Capitol Hill, several years ago.
Beyond Nuclear also co-hosted, along with Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS) of Chicago, as well as Friends of the Earth (FOE), a Dec. 2, 2012 event in Chicago ("A Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High"), marking 70 years since Enrico Fermi's reactor experiment at the University of Chicago, during the Manhattan Project race to the atomic bomb, and atomic bombings of Japan. See Thurlow's presentation in Chicago five years ago. And check out the full website devoted to memorializing and documenting the powerful 2012 event, here.
Susi Snyder, a leader of ICAN, attended the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo, and sat in the front row. Not so many years ago, Susi fought the Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste dump, as well as nuclear weapons testing, in Nevada: she served at Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney's Shundahai Network, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Beatrice Fihn and ICAN were honored at the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability's (ANA) annual D.C. Days on Capitol Hill in May 2017. At that same awards ceremony, Beyond Nuclear -- an ANA member group -- awarded Dave Kraft of NEIS of Chicago the Judy Johnsrud Unsung Hero Award, for his four decades of anti-nuclear power grassroots leadership. Dave anchored the 2012 "Mountain of Waste" event in Chicago mentioned above. Another awardee at that very same ceremony was Tina Cordova, of the Tularosa Downwinders, survivors -- and voices for those who did not survive -- of the Trinity blast's radioactive fallout on July 16, 1945 (which tested the functionality of the plutonium bomb design dropped on Nagasaki just a few weeks later). Yet another award recipient that evening was California Democrat, Ted Lieu, co-sponsor of legislation that would require Congress to authorize the president before he/she could launch a nuclear weapons first strike.