EDMONTON — A lifelong devotion to global disarmament culminated Friday in a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Doug Roche, a former senator and member of Parliament from Edmonton.

Roche was nominated by the International Peace Bureau, a 300-member disarmament organization that itself won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1910.

"We believe he is eminently eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize on account of the multiple outstanding roles he has played, both in the `official' arenas and as a leader in a variety of civil society endeavours," the bureau said in its letter to the Nobel committee.

"Aside from existing Nobel laureates, it is hard to think of a single individual who has worked as hard for disarmament as he, and with such persistence and determination, at the top levels of world politics."

Roche, who is an officer of the Order of Canada, has spent 35 years working on peace and security issues.

In January 2010, he was among a group of anti-nuclear activists urging the federal government to play a bigger role in the effort to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Doug Roche noted that U.S. President Barack Obama has committed himself to disarmament, and urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to follow his lead.

He said there are 23,000 nuclear weapons around the world, with the power of 150,000 Hiroshima bombs.

Roche was the Tory member for Edmonton South and Edmonton Strathcona from 1972 to 1984. He became a senator in 1998 and retired from politics six years later.

In 1988, Roche was elected chairman of the United Nations Disarmament Committee. He has written 20 books, the latest being "How We Stopped Loving the Bomb."

Previously, Roche has won numerous awards for his peace work including the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation for World Peace Award and the United Nations Association's Medal of Honour.

In 1995, Pope John Paul II presented him with the Papal Medal for his service as Special Adviser on disarmament and security matters.