(Bloomberg) — A Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to ban such weapons at a time nuclear rhetoric has reached post-Cold War peaks.
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The grassroots movement, Nihon Hidankyo, receives the prize “for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” the Oslo-based Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement Friday.
Next year will mark 80 years since two American atomic bombs killed an estimated 120,000 inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Survivors of the calamity, who are known as the Hibakusha, came together to form the movement for raising awareness of the disastrous consequences of nuclear weapons on human life.
“The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha have contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo,” the committee said referring to a de facto norm against the use of such arms. “It is therefore alarming that today this taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.”
The organization will receive an 11 million-krona ($1.1 million) award.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia will revise its nuclear doctrine to include a response to “aggression” by non-nuclear states that is supported by other nuclear powers. That followed his warnings to the US and European countries against allowing Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia using Western long-range high-precision weapons. Ukraine and its allies have not threatened Russia with nuclear arms.
“Our message is to Putin and to all world leaders to uphold the international norm against the use of nuclear weapons,” head of the committee Jorgen Watne Frydnes said in an interview. “These are weapons that should never be used again.”
While the overall number of atomic weapons is declining, the number of such warheads deployed with missiles and aircraft has grown and will probably pick up speed in the next years in an “extremely concerning” trend, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in June.
In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced it is keeping the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight for a second year. This is the closest it’s ever been, tied with 1953, the year the US and Soviet Union began testing hydrogen bombs — an even more powerful weapon than an atomic bomb.
“It’s been a pipe dream to imagine that we’d ever win a Nobel Prize,” Hidankyo’s co-Chairperson Toshiyuki Mimaki, told reporters in Hiroshima. “The abolition of nuclear weapons, which we have been calling for, will gain more momentum through this.”
Last month, North Korea released its first photos of a facility to enrich uranium for atomic bombs, showing its leader Kim Jong Un touring a plant at the center of the program. A top South Korean official warned earlier that North Korea might conduct a nuclear test around the time of the November US presidential election.
There are also fears that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
Nihon Hidankyo has provided thousands of witness accounts, issued resolutions and public appeals, and sent annual delegations to the United Nations and a variety of peace conferences to remind the world of the pressing need for nuclear disarmament. Its award joins a string of previous awards “to champions of nuclear disarmament and arms control,” the committee said.
Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba called the award “extremely significant,” speaking at a press conference in Laos.
It’s the eighth time the Nobel Peace Prize is given to work against nuclear weapons. Among the previous laureates, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a coalition of non-governmental organizations in 100 countries, received the accolade in 2017. In 1982, the prize was awarded to Alva Myrdal and Alfonso Garcia Robles “for their work for disarmament and nuclear and weapon-free zones.”
The committee received 286 nominations for this year’s prize, out of which 197 were individuals and the rest organizations. Their names are kept secret for 50 years.
Last year’s laureate is jailed Iranian human-rights activist Narges Mohammadi who has fought against the oppression of women in Iran. In recent years, other human-rights advocates to be acclaimed with a Nobel include Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian organization Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, as well as Liu Xiaobo from China.
The Red Cross has been awarded three times, and other previous laureates include Barack Obama, Martin Luther King and the European Union.
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The prize in economic sciences was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968.
–With assistance from Stephen Treloar, Christopher Jungstedt, Alastair Reed, Yoshiaki Nohara, Takashi Hirokawa and Paul Jackson.
(Updates with comments, details from first paragraph.)
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