This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization that has for decades represented thousands of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Nobel committee said the group received the prize for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” (Washington Post)
To the extent that the Nobel Peace Prize expresses a collective zeitgeist from year to year, then the choice of Nihon Hidankyo as this year’s honoree is understandable. Globally, angst about the menace of nuclear weapons has resurfaced since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That war is one of the rare instances in post-Cold War history of military confrontation, albeit indirect, between Russia and the West, and it is easily the most intense with the most plausible risks of escalation. If that were not enough, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made not-so-thinly veiled threats about the country’s nuclear capabilities in an effort to weaken Western resolve and isolate Kyiv.
There are other visible nuclear concerns as well. China is rapidly building up its nuclear arsenal. North Korea has become a nuclear weapons state. And the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal removed a key obstacle to Iran becoming a nuclear threshold state. These developments, along with Putin’s nuclear gamesmanship, serve as a reminder that the world has entered a dangerous new era of nuclear risk.
To be sure, anti-nuclear sentiment among both the public and governments worldwide has also never been higher, with 93 countries signing on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into force in 2021. And as WPR columnist Charli Carpenter has argued, widespread recriminations of Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling suggest that the war in Ukraine may actually be strengthening the nuclear taboo.
The Nobel committee’s decision to award Nihon Hidankyo with the Peace Prize appears to be both a reflection of nuclear angst and a way to reinvigorate the nuclear taboo. The committee made a similar decision in 2017, when it awarded the Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a group of nongovernmental organizations that had worked to build support for the TPNW.
But while the 2017 award was about recognizing progress, this year’s prize is more focused on memorialization. After all, one of the most effective ways to raise anti-nuclear sentiment is through vivid reminders of the horrors that nuclear weapons unleash, and the survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings in Japan—known as hibakusha—are the only people on Earth who can share actual memories of experiencing those horrors.
Importantly, the awarding of this prize comes at a time when there is a race against the clock to record the hibakushas’ stories before they pass away, with the survivors’ average age now 85. For now, they represent a direct connection to the events that helped solidify the nuclear taboo. Without them, the commitment to that taboo will depend on a more indirect and abstract linkage, one that the Nobel committee clearly wants to nurture.
