Nobel Peace Prize winner Hidankyo calls for a world without nuclear weapons

Nihon Hidankyo accepts Nobel Peace Prize, urges nuclear disarmament amid rising atomic threats 80 years post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan’s atomic bomb survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo accepted its Nobel Peace Prize on Tuesday (December 10, 2024), urging countries to abolish the weapons resurging as a threat 80 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

One of the three co-chairs of Nihon Hidankyo who accepted the prize, 92-year-old Nagasaki survivor Terumi Tanaka, demanded “action from governments to achieve” a nuclear-free world.

The prize was presented at a formal ceremony in Oslo’s City Hall at a time when countries like Russia — which has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — increasingly brandish the atomic threat.

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“I am infinitely saddened and angered that the ‘nuclear taboo’ threatens to be broken,” Tanaka told the assembled dignitaries and guests, some clad in traditional Norwegian bunads or Japanese kimonos.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made nuclear threats in a bid to deter the West and prevail in the war in Ukraine, and signed a decree in mid-November lowering the threshold for using atomic weapons.

In a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro a few days later, the Russian army demonstratively fired a new hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, although in this instance it fired a regular payload instead.