The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organisation of survivors of the 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They demonstrated through their testimony that nuclear weapons should never be used again, the Nobel Committee in Oslo said.
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said on Friday that the award was given because “the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.”
He also said the Nobel Committee “would like to honour all survivors who, despite physical suffering and painful memories, have chosen to use their costly experiences to cultivate hope and participation in the struggle for peace.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee recalled that next year will mark 80 years since “two American atomic bombs killed some 120,000 residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a comparable number died of burns and radiation damage in the months and years that followed.”
Japanese survivors of the bombings, as well as nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, united in 1956 to form Nihon Hidankyo. And provided the world with thousands of testimonies of the unfathomable pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons. Over the years, this testimony led to the formation of an international norm that stigmatised the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. The Norwegian Nobel Committee “recognised one reassuring fact that because of this, nuclear weapons have not been used in wars for almost 80 years.”
Efforts to eradicate nuclear weapons have been recognised by the Nobel Committee in the past. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons won the Peace Prize in 2017, and in 1995, Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs received the prize for “efforts to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in international politics and, in the long term, to eliminate such weapons.”
This year’s prize was awarded against the backdrop of devastating conflicts raging around the world, notably Israel’s wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan.
Alfred Nobel stated in his will that the prize should be awarded for “the greatest or best work in promoting fraternity among nations, in abolishing or reducing standing armies, in holding and encouraging congresses of peace.”
In the year of conflict before the prize was announced, there was speculation that the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which determines the winner, would prefer not to award the prize at all this year.
