Earlier this month, the Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Peace Prize to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo—a grassroots movement of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or hibakusha, as well as people affected by subsequent nuclear weapons testing—for its “efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” In his WPR column last week, Paul Poast noted that the first element of this agenda—nuclear disarmament—may be more aspirational than realistic. But what about the prospects for the second component: strengthening the norm of nuclear non-use?
It is indeed this second component of Nihon Hidankyo’s work that attracted the most attention from the Nobel Committee. As a statement presented by the committee’s chair, Jergen Watne Fydnes, put it, “The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha have contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo. It is therefore alarming that today this taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.” Indeed, the committee’s decision may have been based less on the fact that some states continue to possess nuclear weapons than on the perception that their potential use is becoming increasingly normalized through nuclear threats, nuclear brinksmanship and a new nuclear arms race in lower-yield weapons—known variously as “limited,” “tactical” or “battlefield” nukes—that are seemingly easier to imagine using.
In reality, the nuclear taboo is more resilient than people think. New survey results from UMass Amherst’s Human Security Lab, which I direct, show that 83 percent of Americans say that any use of a nuclear weapon against a civilian-populated area—at which many U.S. nuclear weapons are currently targeted—would violate international law. This number is up 5 percentage points from an identical survey question asked in 2018. But norms remain resilient through the efforts of norm advocates arguing in their favor. So the Nobel Committee hopes that drawing media attention to survivors of the only previous use of nuclear weapons in war, thereby showcasing the impact of nuclear weapons on civilian populations, will help drive home the inherent illegality and inhumanity of these weapons and the humanitarian consequences of nuclear use, bolstering the taboo.