The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese Confederation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Sufferers Organizations, with the award presented at the annual ceremony in Oslo on 10th December. The ceremony, including the Nobel Lecture delivered by Terumi Tanaka, can be viewed online here.
The award recognizes Nihon Hidankyo, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”
Despite immense personal suffering as a result of the impact of the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, survivors of the blasts have borne unfailing witness to the horrific humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons. Their experience and advocacy stand out in the struggle to rid the world of these merciless weapons of mass destruction.
The Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament congratulates Nihon Hidankyo on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, recognizing the power of their courage and determination in exposing the ghastly truth about nuclear weapons, often while battling the personal scars of ill-health, social stigma and advancing age.
No nuclear weapon has been used in nearly 80 years, but today the number of nuclear-armed and nuclear-capable states is growing. Nuclear arsenals across three continents are being modernized at vast expense.
International treaties limiting nuclear arms stocks have been ended or shelved. Discussions on the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for long considered the bedrock of a supposedly safe nuclear order, broke up earlier this year without agreement.
Bellicose rhetoric invoking the real possibility of the use of nuclear weapons – taboo for many years – has become an all-too-frequent feature of statements by politicians in nuclear-armed states, including Russia and the United States, who still hold over 90% of the global nuclear stockpile.
Even the so-called smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons of today are generally more powerful, more destructive than those which inflicted such destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 80 years ago.
If nuclear weapons are ever used again, the scale of destruction will inevitably be far greater than that which caused such suffering to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Far too many “near-misses” have already been documented. While nuclear warheads remain ready to fire, life on earth as we know it remains just minutes away from an apocalyptic end.
We have been dependent on luck to avoid that fate for too long. Sooner or later, whether through malice, machismo, miscalculation or malfunction, that luck will run out.
Twice in the past decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to an organization highlighting the horror of nuclear warfare and calling for an end to nuclear weapons. In 2017, the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN, of which Irish CND is a member), also received the award for its work, particularly its efforts to create an international treaty explicitly outlawing nuclear weapons, which came into force in 2021 as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The voices of those who survived the atomic bombs of 1945, invoking in turn the silence of the hundreds of thousands more who did not survive, need to be heard more than ever today.
We cannot afford not to listen.
Irish CND, together with our colleagues across the world working for the abolition of nuclear arms, calls on all states to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We call on the leaders of nuclear-armed states, in particular, to heed the call of those who have experienced the utter depravity of nuclear warfare, and to put their countries’ stocks of nuclear warheads out of use forever.
