'One Person Shouldn’t Be in Charge of the Fate of the World'

During his visit to South Korea this week, Donald Trump said something supposedly reassuring. The U.S. government, he noted, wants to solve the problem of North Korea’s nuclear weapons peacefully. But, if necessary, it is “prepared to defend itself and its allies using the full range of our unmatched military capabilities,” which “we hope to God we never have to use.”

But as Beatrice Fihn sees it, this type of statement highlights the many problems with how we talk about nuclear weapons. Fihn leads the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which just won the Nobel Peace Prize for mobilizing more than 120 countries to approve a United Nations treaty banning signatories from using, developing, or supporting activities related to nuclear weapons. (The treaty is now open for signatures and will become international law if at least 50 countries ratify it.) Fihn figures that if humans created nuclear weapons and attached significance to them, they are just as capable of destroying these weapons by assigning them a different meaning.

The big idea behind her campaign is simple: to relentlessly treat, not as some “strategic-stability-magic power tool that relates to world peace,” she said. And not just any kind of weapon, but one that belongs in a class that, by indiscriminately targeting civilians, violates international law and has repeatedly been shunned in international treaties prohibiting , , , and .