Peace Prize a stark reminder of N-holocaust

There is an ironic aptness in the Nobel Peace Prize 2024 announced on Friday. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has given it to the grassroots movement of Japan’s atomic bomb survivors, Nihon Hidankyo. The survivors are known as ‘hibakusha’ in the Japanese language.

In the Russia-Ukraine conflict that has been raging since February 2002, Russia President Vladimir Putin had talked of using nuclear weapons as a last resort. The committee has described the message of the survivors who have continued to plead for more than seven decades now for a nuclear weapons free world: “The hibakusha help us describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.”

There are 106,825 atomic bomb survivors which were dropped on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945 as of March this year.

Their average age is 85.6 years. Co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo Toshiyuki Mimaki, a survivor himself, said, “(The win) will be a great force to appeal to the world that the abolition of nuclear weapons and everlasting peace can be achieved. Nuclear weapons should absolutely be abolished.” 

Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Joergen Watne Frydnes told news agency Reuters, “In a world ridden (with) conflicts, where nuclear weapons is definitely a part of it, we wanted to highlight the importance of strengthening the nuclear taboo…is being reduced by threatening, but also how the situation in the world where the nuclear powers are modernising and  upgrading their arsenals.”

The Nobel Peace Prize has been controversial many a time, for political and other reasons. But it would be impossible for anyone to fault the Norwegian Nobel Committee for choosing Nihon Nihon Hidankyo as the recipient of the prize this year.

In the immediate aftermath of the end of the Second World War with the nuclear holocaust in Japan, there was fierce opposition to nuclear weapons in all the countries. Even the leaders of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, were aware of the dangers of the nuclear weapons even as they piled up the nuclear warheads.

They said that they were building the nuclear arsenal only as deterrence, to prevent the other side from using it because of the deadly consequences. It was obviously a negative approach to a dangerous issue.

When the only time the Cold War threatened to become hot during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, the world watched with much apprehension the brinkmanship of then US President John Kennedy and then Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khruschev, and appealed to the two leaders to back off.

But over the years, as negotiations increased between the two superpowers, and Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) I and II were signed as the Cold War petered down, the issue of nuclear weapons and the danger of a nuclear war became nearly irrelevant. This was especially so after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. But apprehensions rose at the turn of the century that nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of the rogue elements, the terrorists. But there were no clear answers to the problem.

The Peace Prize this year to Nihon HIdankyo is a stark reminder to the world that the danger posed by nuclear weapons and the prospect of the use of nuclear weapons is not to be ruled out as long as countries possess nuclear weapons.

There is no alternative to the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. And this is not an easy thing to achieve when nationalist rivalries have reared their head once again.