Choosing the winner of the Nobel peace prize is a bit safer than gambling the farm on the outcome of the 4 o’clock at Kempton Park, but not a lot. History does not flatter the committee that makes the award: from Aung San Suu Kyi to Henry Kissinger, the list of previous laureates is studded with names ranging from the disappointing to the astonishing. In the light of that experience, it should be less of a surprise than it is that this year’s winner is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican).

This is a departure from general tradition: not an individual, nor an official organisation, but a global civil society movement set up only a decade ago, which just last month succeeded in getting the UN to ratify a treaty banning nuclear weapons. Its nearest parallel is the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which in its year of triumph, 1997, had also secured the passage of a treaty, buoyed by the backing of Princess Diana in the last campaign she championed. But the committee rarely engages with the nuclear issue: only twice before has the prize been awarded to an explicitly anti-nuclear campaign: the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a Soviet-US initiative, received the prize in 1985 for creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare; and 10 years later the prize went to the Pugwash Conferences, the organisation set up in 1957 by Bertrand Russell and Joseph Rotblat to promote Einstein’s deathbed warning against the bomb.



But it is a platform where scientists and other intellectuals engage with policymakers: Ican is a bottom-up, grassroots advocacy organisation. Safer than an individual, and maybe – in an age of political disengagement – more likely to change the terms of the debate too.