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nobel peace prize
Can Nuclear Survivors Guide Us all to Peace?
Peace may still be confined to the social margins, but peace proponents, especially those who have transformed their own victimhood into agency, continue pushing against the norm.
Oct 21, 2024
“The past carries unforgettable trauma and pain across the land and among generations of refugees; yet we choose to transform victimhood into agency. We want to be the authors of our future.”
Let these words resonate. In a sense, they’re all we have—if we oppose war and envision a future that transcends it. I’ve quoted these words of Ali Abu Awwad before. They’re part of the Palestinian Nonviolence Charter, but they reach beyond Palestine: deep into the soul, and the hope, of all humanity.
Is there a human future that isn’t in the hands solely of global militarism—war—and the “world leaders” who serve it? Are ordinary people no more than spectators in a world in which some 13,000 nuclear weapons remain stockpiled and ready for use, with our collective suicide an ever-present possibility? Can the pursuit of peace—dismissed by so many with a cynical shrug—ever truly challenge the legitimacy of war?
I nonetheless celebrate and honor every proponent of peace, as they push beyond their spectator status and do what they can to help author humanity’s future.
There’s an irony to these questions, because peace means understanding one’s enemy, not destroying him—something far more complex than a “fight or flight” mentality can comprehend. Intensifying the irony is the fact that those who pursue peace at the deepest, most profound levels are oh so often those most victimized by the global racists and warmongers. Whereas waging war—waging murder—seriously minimizes the scope of one’s humanity, enduring its consequences can expand it.
I confess to a deep frustration about all this. While waging peace means embracing the uncertainty of who we are, waging war is psychologically simple and linear: good verus evil, us versus them. Organizing a social structure—e.g., “the USA”—around war and militarism is far easier than organizing it around wholeness and understanding. Does that mean we’re stuck with war—at least until we nuke ourselves out of existence?
I don’t know the answer to that question. But I nonetheless celebrate and honor every proponent of peace, as they push beyond their spectator status and do what they can to help author humanity’s future.
Consider, for instance, the Hibakusha... the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 (which killed some 200,000 people), as well as survivors in later years of the fallout and hellish effects of nuclear testing around the world.
And yes, 79 years later, some survivors of the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombs are still with us. Many of them have devoted their lives to telling the world about the realities they endured in those bombings. And last week, the organization Nihon Hidankyo, to which many Hibakusha belong, received the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s been a long time coming!
Nihon Hidankyo was founded in 1956, essentially in defiance of Japan’s U.S. occupiers, which, according to the organization’s website, “strictly prohibited the people to write or speak about the bombing and damages, including the miserable deaths of 200,000 people, from the Japanese government even after the country regained its sovereignty in 1952.”
They knew the world needed to know what they had endured. The world still needs to know. Yes, seven years ago, the United Nations (by a vote of 122-1) created the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, declaring nuclear weapons to be... uh, illegal. But the vote was boycotted by the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations, along with all of NATO—and, in any case, the treaty only applies to the countries that have signed and ratified it: 73 countries as of today.
So something is happening here. Post-nuclear peace—or simply peace itself—may still be confined to the social margins, but peace proponents, especially those who have transformed their own victimhood into agency, continue pushing against the norm.
“For over half a century since its founding,” the site informs us, “Nihon Hidankyo has sent Hibakusha delegations to many parts of the world in order to give testimonies on the atrocious damage and human sufferings caused by the use of nuclear weapons, and endeavored to ensure no more Hibakusha would be created anywhere in the world, calling for creating a ‘nuclear weapon-free world.’”
This is not an abstraction, even though the perpetrators of war do their best to make it so. For instance, some months ago, as the Israeli assault on Gaza was getting underway, Israeli cabinet minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested during an interview that using a nuclear weapon on Gaza was a distinct possibility.
In response, 85-year-old Toshiko Tanaka, who lived in Hiroshima and was six years old when her city was nuked, said in outrage that Eliyahu “doesn’t realize how terrible the use of nuclear weapons is...”
“I hope,” she added, “that the leaders of each nation will not put their own national interests first, but look at the world as a whole and determine a path toward peace.”
If only she could be heard—across the infinite divide separating those in power, especially members of the so-called “nuclear club,” from ordinary humans! “The world as a whole” is where we all live. It’s one entity. If we don’t learn how to live as one, we’ll die as one.
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Nihon Hidankyo's Nobel Peace Prize Win Could Not Have Come at a More Important Moment
With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year's Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy.
Oct 12, 2024
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nihon Hidankyo is long overdue and could not come at a more important time.
The Hibakusha (A-bomb witness/survivors) of Nihon Hidankyo have been among the world’s most courageous and steadfast advocates of nuclear disarmament. The organization has focused on three core demands: preventing nuclear war, eliminating nuclear weapons, and obtaining essential medical care for A-bomb victims.
Hidankyo was founded in 1956, in the wake of the Bravo H-Bomb test 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, which poisoned Japanese fishermen and Marshall Islanders.
As Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to witness the ruins and suffering in Hiroshima in 1945, later reported, despite their excruciating physical and emotional suffering, the Hibakusha became the world’s most powerful and influential force for the abolition. With the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the voices of the Hibakusha, their tortured testimonies, and their truth that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist will now ring out more powerfully around the world.
Nihon Hidankyo was repeatedly nominated for its now well-earned Peace Prize, and the Nobel Committee is now to be celebrated for finally making this year’s decision. With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy. In addition to Russian nuclear threats related to the continuing Ukraine war, an accident, incident, or miscalculation growing out of provocative U.S., allied, and Chinese military operations in and around the Taiwan Strait and the South China/West could ignite escalation to a nuclear cataclysm.
With uncertainties about a possible Trump election victory, there are growing demands among Japanese and South Korean elites for their nations to become nuclear powers. The U.S. and Russia have lowered their official operational thresholds for launching their nuclear weapons. All of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, with the U.S. committing an estimated two trillion dollars to “modernize” its systems when that money could be spent to stanch and reverse the climate emergency and to address other urgent human needs.
"The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs."
Let us marvel and learn from the reality that Hibakusha, who were literally the last people on Earth, once seen by U.S. leaders and media as “vermin” to be eliminated, have awakened the conscience of the world after suffering what was probably the world’s worst war crime. And contrary to the myth propagated by President Truman, the A-bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan. Senior U.S. military officials from Eisenhower to LeMay and Leahy advised the president that “it wasn’t necessary to hit Japan with that awful thing” Secretary of War Stimson had already advised that Japan’s surrender on terms acceptable to the U.S. could be negotiated.”
Hibakusha’s friends, families, and neighbors were incinerated, irradiated, and physically ripped apart by the radiation’s heat and blast waves of the world’s first A-bombs. An entire city was destroyed and burned to the ground. Amidst their own agonies, many Hibakusha were unable to save their families in their shattered and burning homes. They witnessed ghostlike figures, no longer recognizable as human beings, some holding their eyeballs or intestines in their hands marching to their deaths, often in cisterns or the city’s rivers.
In the months and years that followed, many died from radiation-inflicted cancers and other diseases. Memories remain of the birthing of mutant babies and of other young children whose lives were cut short by radiation diseases. With initial fears that the radiation diseases might be contagious and about genetic damages, Hibakusha’s suffering was compounded by marginalization and discrimination.
As a result of the U.S. military occupation which continued until 1952 and subsequently with Japan functioning as the United States’ subservient ally, essential medical and other support services were long denied to Hibakusha. Among the achievements of Nihon Hidankyo and its allies are the collaborations they have built with other “global hibakusha.” These included forced laborers who were brought from Japanese-occupied Korea who also suffered the A-bombings. Compassionately and strategically they supported and joined with nuclear weapons test victims from the Marshall Islands, the United States, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tahiti, the Christmas Islands, and other Pacific Islands. Together with their testimonies in communities across the world and in the United Nations they forged the powerful but still inadequate taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. With their testimonies at the U.N. and elsewhere they have won the majority of the world’s governments to the understanding that for the human species to survive, priority must be given to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not so-called “state security” interests.
Hibakusha testimonies were essential to the successful negotiation of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which seeks to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable to their Article VI Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.
That nuclear weapons have not been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing was an unfortunate misstatement in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s award announcement. As Daniel Ellsberg, a principal author of the United States’ nuclear war planning in the Kennedy administration, taught during many international crises and wars, the U.S. has used its nuclear arsenal in the same way that an armed robber uses his gun when pointed at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used.
Tragically, this is a playbook from which the Russian government has been working with its Ukraine-war nuclear threats. It is worth noting that in response to the announcement of the award, Hidankyo referenced the terrible assaults on the people of Gaza. The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs.
They then warned of the danger that the U.S. might resort to a nuclear attack (which the U.S. prepared and threatened in 1954, 1957, and with President Nixon's 1969 "madman" nuclear mobilization. Numerous popular initiatives are at work in the world which will be boosted by the Peace Prize award to Nihon Hibakusha.
In the U.S., the Back from the Brink campaign, initiated by Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been at the cutting edge. Its call for negotiation of a verifiable agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, renunciation of first-use policies, ending the president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons has been endorsed by 43 members of Congress and numerous U.S. cities and states.
The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security works to prevent nuclear war and achieve a nuclear weapons-free world via its advocacy of Common Security. This is the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rival. As with the INF Treaty that ended the Cold War before the fall of the Cold War, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals.
In the face of the horrors of nuclear weapons and drawing on the courage of Hibakusha, this is the paradigm on which the Hibakusha's vision of a nuclear weapons-free world can be achieved.
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NATO Announces Nuclear Drills as Nobel Goes to Atomic Weapon Abolitionists
Disarmament advocate Beatrice Fihn stressed that the exercise is practice for "wiping out hundreds of thousands of civilians" with weapons that would also "flatten cities and poison survivors."
Oct 11, 2024
The NATO military block announced Friday that its annual nuclear exercise is set to begin next week—news that arrived just as Japanese atomic bomb survivors who advocate for disarmament received the Nobel Peace Prize.
"There is bad timing, there is dropping a brick... and then there is this. Nice work," the Geneva Nuclear Disarmament Initiative said in response to NATO Spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah on social media.
Dakhlallah shared a NATO statement explaining that "Steadfast Noon," the two-week military drills scheduled to start Monday, will include 2,000 soldiers from eight air bases and more than 60 "nuclear-capable jets, bombers, fighter escorts, refueling aircraft, and planes capable of reconnaissance and electronic warfare" flying over western Europe.
"Nuclear deterrence is the cornerstone of allied security," NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in the statement. "Steadfast Noon is an important test of the alliance's nuclear deterrent and sends a clear message to any adversary that NATO will protect and defend all allies."
Mary Wareham, deputy director of the crisis, conflict, and arms division at Human Rights Watch, also responded to the spokesperson on social media, asking, "Any comment from NATO on today's announcement that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese association of atomic bomb survivors organization Nihon Hidankyo?"
Since the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, survivors known as hibakusha have shared their experiences to promote peace. The Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday honored the group Nihon Hidankyo, which "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."
The committee highlighted that "the nuclear powers are modernizing and upgrading their arsenals; new countries appear to be preparing to acquire nuclear weapons; and threats are being made to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare. At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen."
The peace award and plans for NATO's exercise come as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip, and provocations against Iran have heightened global fears of nuclear war. Russia and the United States have by far the largest arsenals, but China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom also have nuclear weapons.
Beatrice Fihn, director of Lex International and a senior fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, stressed on social media Friday that NATO exercise is practice for "wiping out hundreds of thousands of civilians" with weapons that would also "flatten cities and poison survivors."
Fihn previously directed the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which in 2017 won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. On Friday, she urged countries that haven't yet signed the treaty to "listen" to the Nobel committee and Nidon Hidankyo.
ICAN's current executive director, Melissa Parke, said in a Friday statement that the campaign "is honored to have been able to work alongside Nihon Hidankyo and the hibakusha to push for the total elimination of nuclear weapons."
"Their testimonies and tireless campaigning have been crucial to progress on nuclear disarmament in general and the adoption and entry into force of the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons," she added. "We call on the nuclear-armed states and their allies which support the use of nuclear weapons, including of course Japan, to heed their call to abolish these inhumane weapons, to make sure what they have been through never happens again."
Gregory Kulacki, who has worked with disarmament advocates in Japan as East Asia project manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program, similarly said Friday that "the testimony of the Hibakusha demonstrates the grave risks we still run by the very existence of nuclear weapons, which have only become more destructive. It's time for the world to not only acknowledge the risks of nuclear weapons but take action to enact a permanent international ban against them."
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