More dangerously, the peace prize has nourished the flame of an idea that should have gone out for good 76 years ago — namely, that disarmament, particularly by democracies in the name of setting a good global example, is an essential ingredient of peace.

Walter Lippmann, nobody’s idea of a right-wing reactionary, put his finger on the problem in the tragic wake of another supposedly golden era of arms control. “The disarmament movement,” he wrote in 1943, proved “tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament.” In the name of peace, the good left themselves increasingly defenseless, their allies and dependents increasingly anxious, their rivals and enemies increasingly ambitious and, in time, violent.

“The generation which most sincerely and elaborately declared that peace is the supreme end of foreign policy got not peace,” Lippmann added, “but a most devastating war.”

One of the supposed paradoxes of our day is that the past quarter-century has been a golden age of nuclear disarmament. From a mid-1980s peak of more than 70,000 warheads world-wide, we’re down to fewer than 15,000. South Africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus all voluntarily abandoned their nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War.

Yet none of this has made the free world safer. Ukrainians can rue their 1994 decision to abandon their nuclear arsenal as the reason Vladimir Putin felt free to invade in 2014. The United States withdrew its tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991 as a peace-building measure. So much for that. Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo are very quietly mulling their nuclear options as doubts about the reliability of American guarantees grow. So is Saudi Arabia in the face of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or at least it was during the previous administration.

Throughout the Cold War, non-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize such as Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush prevented another world war by ignoring the antinuclear idealism that animates ICAN. What a shame that a name as prestigious as Nobel should entrust the cause of peace to its most incompetent and — if heeded — dangerous practitioners.