Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors

The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that works toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

The award was announced Friday at a news conference in Oslo, Norway by Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Joergen Watne Frydnes. He said the group was receiving the peace prize for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

The two U.S. bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 initially killed approximately 120,000 people, with roughly that same number dying later from burns and radiation effects. There are about 650,00 survivors, known in Japan as Hibakusha.

According to a statement from the Nobel Committee, the fate of the survivors was concealed and ignored. In 1956, local Hibakusha associations, along with victims of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, came together to form what would become known in Japanese as Nihon Hidankyo.

The statement said the grassroots movement soon became the largest and most widely representative Hibakusha organization in Japan. It has two main objectives: to promote the social and economic rights of all Hibakusha, including those living outside Japan, and to ensure no one ever again is subjected to nuclear weapons.

In a 2020 interview with the French news agency AFP, then 74-year-old Nihon Hidankyo member Jiro Hamasumi said, "If we don't speak, the bombing will be forgotten as if it had never happened. That's why we must keep the history and people's testimonies on record.”

In its statement, the Nobel Committee said the group has, through educational campaigns based on their own experience, “helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons.”

Noting the numerous conflicts in the world and that threats are being made to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare, the committee said, “At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.”

In a statement Friday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warmly congratulated the Nihon Hidankyo organization, calling them “selfless, soul-bearing witnesses of the horrific human cost of nuclear weapons,” and called them “the backbone of the global nuclear disarmament movement.”

“It is time for world leaders to be as clear-eyed as the hibakusha and see nuclear weapons for what they are: devices of death that offer no safety, protection, or security,“ Guterres said. “The only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons is to eliminate them altogether.”

The honor includes a cash prize of just over $1 million that is shared equally among all the laureates.

The prizes for literature, medicine, physics and chemistry were awarded earlier this week. The Nobel prize for economics will be awarded Monday.

The peace prize will be formally presented at a ceremony in Oslo on Dec. 10, while the rest of the awards will be presented that same day in Stockholm.

Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.