Oslo:
Japan's atomic bomb survivors' group Nihon Hidankyo accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Tuesday and advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons, which are reemerging as a threat 80 years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of Nihon Hidankyo's three co-chairs, 92-year-old Nagasaki survivor Terumi Tanaka, demanded “action from governments to” achieve a nuclear weapons-free world.
The prize was awarded at a time when countries such as Russia – which has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world – are increasingly brandishing the atomic threat.
“I am infinitely saddened and angry that the 'nuclear taboo' is in danger of being broken,” Tanaka told dignitaries at Oslo City Hall, some dressed in traditional Norwegian bunads or Japanese kimonos.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made nuclear threats as he pressed the war in Ukraine. He signed a decree in November that lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
In an attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro a few days later, the Russian military fired a new hypersonic missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, although in this case it had a normal payload.
Nihon Hidankyo attempts to rid the planet of weapons of mass destruction, drawing on testimonies from Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, known as “hibakusha”.
The American bombing of Japanese cities on August 6 and 9, 1945, killed 214,000 people, leading to Japan's surrender in World War II.
Burned bodies
Tanaka was 13 years old when Nagasaki was bombed, the epicenter just two miles west of his home. Five members of his family were killed.
He was upstairs reading a book when the A-bomb fell.
“I heard the explosion and suddenly saw a bright white light surrounding everything and everything went silent,” he recalls.
“I was really surprised. I felt my life was in danger.”
He rushed to the ground floor and lost consciousness when two glass doors blown out by the blast fell on him, although the glass did not break.
Three days later, he and his mother went looking for their relatives. Then they realized the magnitude of the disaster.
“When we reached a ridge above the hills, we could look over the city and that's when we saw for the first time that absolutely nothing was left. Everything was black and charred.”
He saw seriously injured people fleeing the city, burned bodies along the road. He and his mother cremated his aunt's body “with our own hands.”
“I was numb and couldn't feel anything.”
Nihon Hidankyo's ranks are shrinking every year. The Japanese government reports that there are approximately 106,800 “hibakusha” still alive. Their average age is 85 years.
'Uphold the nuclear taboo'
For the West, the nuclear threat also comes from North Korea, which has stepped up its ballistic missile tests, and from Iran, which is suspected of wanting to develop nuclear weapons, although it denies this.
Nine countries now have nuclear weapons: Britain, China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United States and, unofficially, Israel.
“Our movement has undoubtedly played an important role in creating the 'nuclear taboo,'” Tanaka said.
“However, there are still 12,000 nuclear warheads on Earth today, 4,000 of which are operationally deployed, ready for immediate launch.”
In 2017, 122 governments negotiated and adopted a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), but the text is largely considered symbolic because no nuclear power has signed it.
While all ambassadors stationed in Oslo were invited to Tuesday's ceremony, the only nuclear powers present were Britain, France, India, Pakistan and the United States. Russia, China, Israel and Iran were not present, the Nobel Institute said.
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, expressed concern that the world is entering “a new, more unstable nuclear era” and warned that “a nuclear war could destroy our civilization.”
“Today's nuclear weapons have far greater destructive power than the two bombs used against Japan in 1945. They could kill millions of us in an instant, inflict even more injuries and catastrophically disrupt the climate,” he warned.
Later, the Nobel laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics received their prizes from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a separate ceremony in Stockholm, followed by a banquet for some 1,250 guests.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)