Nuclear Winter : Nihon Hidankyo, Nobel Peace Prize

"[The award was made as the] taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure."

"[The Nobel Committee] wishes to honour all survivors who despite physical suffering and painful memories have chosen to use their costly experience to cultivate hope and engagement for peace."

Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chair, Norwegian Nobel committee

"We are partners in this fight."

"[The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] know nuclear weapons the best."

"They know how it feels like, how it looks like,  how it smells when your city is burning from nuclear weapons use."

Beatrice Fihn, past executive director, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

 

Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. This is a Japanese organization comprised of survivors of the wartime U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Nihon Hidankyo won the award in recognition of their tireless activism against nuclear weaponry. The organization's branch chairperson, Yoshiyuki Mimaki had been standing by awaiting the announcement, and when it was given, he cheered: "Is it really true? Unbelievable!", he exulted.

A month ago, yet again, Russian President Vladimir Putin put the world on notice that he had decided to shift his country's nuclear doctrine. This had a defined purpose; to deliver a message to the Democratic West supporting Ukraine's courageous counteroffensive against its neighbour's unilateral move to destroy its independence and reduce the country once again to an appendage of Greater Russia -- Vladimir Putin's yearning for a return of the power of the USSR. 

Russia, he implied, would not hesitate to make use of its vast stockpile of nuclear weapons should those NATO nations supplying Ukraine with defensive weaponry allow it to strike inside Russian borders with longer-range weapons; effectively reducing its measure of the threshold for the potential use of Russian nuclear weapons as a blackmail-deterrent. Simply put, the Kremlin would not tolerate nations sympathetic to Ukraine's courageous response to a full-scale invasion enabling Ukraine to return to Russia the scope of its assault in self-defence.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons had won the prize in 2017 for its like-minded campaign. As did Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in 1995 for "their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and in the longer run to eliminate such arms."

"The two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people, and their effects are still being felt today."

"By the end of 1945, the bombing had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima, and a further 74,000 in Nagasaki. In the years that followed, many of the survivors would face leukemia, cancer, or other terrible side effects from the radiation."

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Devastation in Nagasaki, 1945. Courtesy Imperial War Museums.

"It is very clear that threats of using nuclear weapons are putting pressure on the important international norm, the taboo of using nuclear weapons."

"And therefore it is alarming to see how threats of use is also damaging this norm."

Jorgen Watne Frydnes, Nobel Committee