As a 13-year-old girl, Setsuko Thurlow was knocked unconscious by the blast from the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. She became trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building, but eventually managed to crawl free.

“Most of my classmates in that building were burned to death alive,” she recalled. “I saw all around me utter, unimaginable devastation … The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the air.”

A living witness to the horrors of nuclear war, Setsuko jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to ICAN in 2017. “Every second of every day, nuclear weapons endanger everyone we love and everything we hold dear,” she warned.

“We must not tolerate this insanity any longer.”

She urged world leaders to sign the recently adopted Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. “Let this be the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons,” she said. “Join this treaty; forever eradicate the threat of nuclear annihilation.”