What Prize Glory?

In the best of times, peace is hard to come by and even harder to person alize and attribute to any individual. The Nobel Prize committee learned that the hard way last year when it sought to honor Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese Chief Negotiator Le Due Tho with its Peace Prize for negotiating the U.S. withdrawal from America's longest war. Hawks who blamed North Viet Nam for the hostilities were outraged at the choice of Tho; doves who thought the war could have been ended much sooner were angry at the choice of Kis singer; Richard Nixon was hurt and Irritated that he did not receive a share of the accolade.

This time around, against a year of bloodshed in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Cyprus and even continuing in Viet Nam, there were not even any A's to be awarded for success, however flawed, but only for effort. On that basis, the Nobel committee again divided the Peace Prize last week, naming former Irish Foreign Minister Sean Mac-Bride, 70, and former Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, 73. MacBride's achievement was somewhat less dubious than that of Sato: the Irishman was one of the founders and until recently chair man of Amnesty International, a group working for the release of political prisoners. He has headed Geneva's Inter national Peace Bureau, the world's old est peace organization. He has been instrumental in getting human-rights safeguards built into various international agreements. The five-man committee that awarded MacBride his Nobel Prize noted that the fight against injustice makes a contribution to peace.

Sato was praised for having consistently maintained that Japan should not create its own nuclear weapons. He was also praised for having signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty on behalf of Japan, despite the fact that the Diet has so far refused to ratify the ban.

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