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October 18, 2024
Nihon Hidankyo’s Bittersweet Receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize
The prize is a reminder that we must abolish and eliminate nuclear weapons.
Terumi Tanaka, cochair of Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, speaks during a press conference on October 12, 2024, in Tokyo, Japan.(Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images)
Friday’s announcement of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, sent waves of elation and excitement through the peace and disarmament movements worldwide. The general public seems to have gotten in on the action, too, given all the media coverage and the many messages we’ve received about the prize. To us, it was also personally gratifying. We have been nominating Hidankyo for the Nobel for years.
The superb recipient choice comes at a moment of global peril. The Ukraine war is heading for its third anniversary, with no signs of diplomatic efforts intended to bring the conflict to a close. If anything, last week’s departure of Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov from Washington, without even a named replacement, confirms that relations between the United States and Russia are at their lowest points in decades. As of late, there has been no high-level contact between the two nuclear behemoths, either one of which can single[handedly end human civilization as we know it. Even during the Cold War, the Soviet Union maintained back-channel communications with and an ambassadorial presence in DC at all times. The broadening of the Gaza conflict into a regional war and the continued tensions in East Asia further portend a global catastrophe. Elevating voices of reason, compassion, peace, and yes, nuclear disarmament, is urgently needed. The Norwegian Nobel Committee played an admirable role in making it so.
There is also a sense that the moment is bittersweet. Many of the atomic bomb survivors (Hibakusha), who have been so integral to the anti-nuclear movement, have already passed on. The ones who are still alive—all essentially in their 80s and 90s—watch in despair as children are dying and suffer in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere, and the prospect of nuclear war looms over all of humanity. Have their stories of pain, suffering, and devastation in the aftermath of the atomic bombings been shared in vain? Who has been listening? The world leaders, most especially leaders of the nine nuclear weapons–possessing countries, whose arsenals consist of approximately 12,500 nuclear warheads, have clearly not.
The prize is a reminder—as the Hibakusha themselves are—that we must abolish and eliminate nuclear weapons, whose very existence Pope Francis has called immoral. Acknowledging the Hibakusha’s heroic efforts impels us to ask questions like “How much suffering is acceptable in the course of a war?” and “Are we willing to risk annihilation to achieve our geopolitical goals?” It strikes us as madness that nuclear weapons use is being considered again today.
Russian leaders have made it clear that they would consider a nuclear response if Ukraine, with NATO’s assistance, uses US, United Kingdom, and other nations’ long-range missiles to attack deep inside of Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as UK leaders and American hawks, purportedly including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have been pressuring President Joe Biden to authorize such attacks based on the assumption that Putin will once again back down. Some US military leaders appear to have thus far prevailed upon President Biden not to go down this route. Both democratic and autocratic leaders can only ignore their own red lines so many times before being forced to respond. We saw this situation with Iran’s latest missile launch against Israel and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Moreover, President Putin, like President Biden, is surrounded by hawks who push him to act more boldly and show his resolve.
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The Middle East is equally alarming. The US appears to have stopped pressuring Israel to accept a ceasefire and given its approval to carry the war to Lebanon and weaken, if not eliminate, Hezbollah. Israel, meanwhile, contemplates its response to Iran’s recent missile attack. Israeli hawks, cheered on by former president Donald Trump and others, demand an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. Should such an attack occur, with or without US assistance, Iran would likely rush to develop a bomb. While Iran was only enriching uranium to 3.67 percent when the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, was in effect, it is now purportedly enriching to 60 percent and could quickly ramp that up to over 90 percent or weapons-grade. If Iran develops a nuclear bomb, which it could probably do in weeks—not the year that it would have taken before Trump abrogated the JCPOA—how far behind would Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt be?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who may be less constrained than other leaders in using Israel’s substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons if Israel were threatened, appears to be doing all he can to draw the United States into a war with Iran. Should Israel strike Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities, the threatened Iranian response may spark the kind of cycle of retaliation that could indeed spark US involvement in defending its close ally. The United States is now sending a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense missile battery operated by US troops to Israel to blunt an expected Iranian missile response and Biden administration officials are doubling down on their promise to defend Israel. How will Iran’s friends Russia and China respond to US-Israel war with Iran? With multiple nuclear-armed powers in this volatile region, the chances of nuclear war would skyrocket.
Speaking of China, the situation in the Pacific is equally poised for confrontation. Conflicts over Taiwan and the South China Sea threaten to burst out at any time. The United States under President Biden has been militarizing the region and the Chinese are responding with their own buildup. US Air Force General Mike Minihan has predicted a war between the US and China in 2025. Other analysts and military officials consider Minihan alarmist and push the date for the inevitable war back by two to four years. US regional allies, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and New Zealand, also appear to be preparing for such an eventuality with new military bases, large-scale military exercises, the introduction of new weapons systems, troop buildups, and sharply increased military spending. Japan’s new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, has called for the establishment of an Asian NATO to contain China and expressed his desire to engage in nuclear sharing with the US, a long-standing practice currently operative in five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey) and also in Belarus with Russian nuclear weapons. Japan has already effectively shredded its postwar peace constitution and is doubling its military spending, in total and complete abjuration of the message of Nihon Hidankyo and the Hibakusha.
Amidst the bleak international picture and the prospects of nuclear war, there is some good news besides the Nobel Peace Prize—the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The TPNW is the latest international instrument to attempt to control, as other agreements have done, but also to abolish, nuclear weapons. This is the treaty that the Hibakusha community has been utterly devoted to and has worked very hard to support. To get to the full treaty implementation, we not only need a change of course on geopolitical relations, but also a paradigm shift on nuclear weapons, as called for by Ambassador Alexander Kmentt of Austria and as already practiced by the 150 parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that do not rely on nuclear weapons for their security.
Nuclear deterrence works brilliantly until it stops working, and then, as President Kennedy said of his hawkish military advisers who urged an invasion of Cuba during the missile crisis in 1962, “none of us will be alive to tell them they were wrong.” The US relies on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence for so-called national security. What is security if the US can spend a trillion dollars a year on “defense,” only to be vulnerable to total and utter destruction in nuclear war? How can something that threatens to destroy not just the foundations of our civilization, but humanity itself, at the same time keep us safe? One answer is that we have quite simply been lucky and that our luck may run out, and very soon.
Ultimately, people everywhere will need to help tear down the system that threatens to destroy our world each and every day. This may seem like an exaggeration, but in the fall of 2022, the US Central Intelligence Agency put the probability of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine at 50 percent. Once the genie is out, simulations suggest that the use of a single bomb would inevitably lead to a full-blown nuclear war, in a matter of mere minutes.
Even if the probability of use is far smaller than 50 percent, over time, it adds up. An estimate by professor Martin Hellman of Stanford University, before the Ukraine war and the other current conflicts, was 1 percent per year. This translates to more than a 50 percent chance of nuclear conflict in the 80-year projected lifetime of a child born today. These are unacceptable odds for our children and grandchildren and for humanity as a whole.
We call on President Biden to invite the Nobel Prize recipients to the White House to discuss their experience in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We furthermore call on him to organize a forum on nuclear disarmament at the White House to forge a path forward for eliminating the global nuclear scourge, using the framework of the TPNW.
Moreover, we call for an emergency global summit of the most powerful world leaders to heed the call of the planet’s citizens to find diplomatic offramps to all the global crises before it is too late. In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev both understood how close we had come to nuclear annihilation and that we had survived more by luck than by statesmanship in a situation over which they had both lost control. After the crisis, Khrushchev wrote Kennedy a letter urging that they work together to eliminate all conflicts that could cause a new crisis. It took a while, but Kennedy responded in kind, and in his great American University Commencement Address called for an end to the Cold War and the nuclear arms race that hung over humanity like the Sword of Damocles.
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Few leaders of the world’s great nations have since spoken for the planet in the way Kennedy and Khrushchev did in 1963. That wisdom and statesmanship are more urgently needed today than at any time since the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war in 1962. We are teetering again today and desperate steps are needed to avert disaster. If Reagan and Gorbachev could come within a hairbreadth of eliminating nuclear weapons in Reykjavik in 1986 as Kennedy and Khrushchev wanted to do in 1963, there is no reason we can’t achieve that today. This is what the Hibakusha have been imploring us to do for decades. We join people around the world in congratulating the members of Nihon Hidankyo on their well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize. May it be a wake-up call, and may their message of peace and nuclear abolition be heeded before it’s too late.
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Ivana Nikolić Hughes
Ivana Nikolić Hughes is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a senior lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University. Her research on ascertaining the radiological conditions in the Marshall Islands has been covered widely, including by the Los Angeles Times. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Peter Kuznick
Peter Kuznick is a professor of history and the director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.
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