She is mostly known throughout the world for being a leading figure of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons (ICAN) and to have given the acceptance speech for its reception of the 2017 Nobel peace prize.

Three weeks before the bomb, she was selected to participate in a student state program to decode American military communications as an assistant.

[3][4] On Monday August 6, 1945, she was working as a member of the student mobilisation program in the army headquarters (Higashi suburb today), located approximately 1.8 kilometres or 1.1 miles away from the hypocentre of the explosion.

[...] So we went to the nearby stream, washed off our dirt and the blood, and tore off our blouses, soaked them in the water, and dashed back to the dying people.

[6] Like many hibakushas, she described being numbed by the overwhelming pain of what she experienced, and she was only able to cry after the Makurazaki Typhoon that hit Hiroshima more than a month after "Little Boy".

[14] Thurlow has also regularly described the hardships of the hibakushas, including the near starvation, lack of medical care, homelessness, social discrimination and the suffering from the atomic bomb casualty commission whose only purpose was to study the technical effects of radiations on bodies and not provide any treatment or support.

[15] She has denounced the US army's 7 years occupation and its strict censorship, erasement and confiscation of journals, data, visual support, poems and personal diaries of what was related to the drop of the two nuclear bombs.

[18][19] Setsuko Thurlow's activism began after March 1, 1954, after the explosion of the hydrogen bomb of the code name "Castle Bravo" in the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands which had nuclear fallout until Japan.

During her studying years in the USA, she has described receiving threats and aggressions linked to her criticism of the use of the nuclear bomb by the American army, to the point where she could not go to class anymore and had to live at one of her professor's house.

[12][22][23][24] She is a member of Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese confederation of A and H Bombs sufferers formed in 1956, who fought for hibakushas medical rights and social recognition.

[25] In 1974, profoundly worried by the fact that the public tended to forget and underestimate the devastating impacts of nuclear bombs, she founded the foundation Hiroshima Nagasaki Relived.

[20] The organisation mobilised professors, artists, lawyers and teachers to inform and raise public awareness to the consequences of nuclear weapons.

[20] She has since travelled in dozens of countries to testify as a hibakusha and raise alert to the existential threat of nuclear weapons, in front of high dignitaries such as Pope John Paul II as much as school students.

[26] She has participated in several school presentations as a member of the project "Hibakusha stories" based in New-York, to testify before all-together several thousands of students.

Thurlow is also an activist against the peaceful use of nuclear energy due to its existential dangers and has been particularly active as a critic with other hibakushas after the Fukushima humanitarian catastrophe.

[30] Thurlow accepted the prize on behalf of the campaign at a ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2017, together with Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of ICAN.

During her reception speech, Mrs Thurlow declared, in reference to the moment she was trapped under the building after the bombing and saved by a soldier: "Then, suddenly, I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man saying: "Don't give up!