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The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organisation of atomic bomb survivors from the 1945 attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The grassroots group was awarded the prize on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel committee, which recognised “its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.
At a press conference in Hiroshima on Friday, Toshiyuki Mimaki, the head of Nihon Hidankyo, appeared overwhelmed by the news, pinching his cheek to check he was not dreaming and welling up in tears.
“[The awarding of the prize] would be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons can be achieved. Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished,” said Mimaki.
The prize comes against the backdrop of rising nuclear rhetoric from political leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The nuclear powers are modernising and upgrading their arsenals . . . and threats are being made to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare,” said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the new chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee.
“It is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen,” he added.
Frydnes warned that today’s nuclear weapons were far more destructive than those dropped by the US on the two Japanese cities in 1945.
“They can kill millions and would impact the climate catastrophically. A nuclear war could destroy our civilisation,” he said.
There are 106,000 living survivors of the two atomic bombings, who are known in Japanese as hibakusha and now have an average age of almost 86.
Many experienced severe discrimination in the postwar years related to their radiation exposure, as did their children.
The survivors’ message reverberated around the world at the height of the cold war in 1982, when Nihon Hidankyo’s Senji Yamaguchi made a speech at the UN. His address ended with the line “No more Hiroshima. No more Nagasaki. No more hibakusha. No more war” — words that would come to frame the message of the global anti-nuclear movement.
In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima and participated in a ceremony where senior figures in Nihon Hidankyo featured prominently. They included Mikiso Iwasa, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, a former chair of the organisation and one of the world’s foremost crusaders against nuclear weapons.
At the 70th anniversary of the bombing in 2015, Iwasa told the Financial Times that the greatest risk the world faced was forgetting what had taken place in Hiroshima.
“The fact that the world is still bristling with 15,000 nuclear weapons means that anyone in the world could become a hibakusha at any time,” he said.
Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said the award was “extremely meaningful” for a group that had long worked for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said: “The award is a reminder of why we must continue to work for both the disarmament and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. And it is a necessary warning against those who make direct threats about the use of nuclear weapons.”
Much of the focus before this year’s prize had centred on the Middle East after a year of conflict.
But the committee said it wanted to honour the remaining survivors of atomic bombs who “despite physical suffering and painful memories, have chosen to use their costly experience to cultivate hope and engagement for peace”.
“One day, the [survivors] will no longer be among us as witnesses to history,” Frydnes said. “But with a strong culture of remembrance and continued commitment, new generations in Japan are carrying forward the experience and the message of the witnesses.”
The winner of the peace prize, the fifth of six annual Nobel awards, receives SKr11mn ($1mn). Sweden’s central bank will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for economics on Monday.