A 92-year-old Japanese survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki accepted this year’s Nobel Peace Prize on Tuesday on behalf of anti-nuclear weapons groups and spoke of the horrors he witnessed in 1945.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in October to Nippon Hidankyo, a group made up of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States, also known as A-bomb survivors. Founded in 1956, the organization aims to maintain taboos on the use of nuclear weapons and has been fighting for nearly 70 years to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide.
The United States first and only used the weapon on two Japanese cities in 1945, hastening Japan’s surrender to the Allies to end World War II. By the end of that year, the atomic bombings had killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki, but the death toll continued to rise for decades as people died from the effects of long-term radiation exposure.
Since then, nuclear weapons have proliferated around the world and are now capable of inflicting hundreds or even thousands of times more damage than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. As the atomic bomb survivors age, many fear that the stigma associated with the use of nuclear bombs will fade and their experiences will be lost to history.
“Russia, the nuclear power, has threatened to use nuclear weapons in its war against Ukraine, and Israeli ministers have even spoken of the possibility of using nuclear weapons amid the relentless attack on Palestinian Gaza.” Elderly survivor Tanaka Termi said this in his acceptance speech in Oslo.
“I feel infinitely saddened and angry that the ‘nuclear taboo’ is under threat of being broken,” said Tanaka, one of the three presidents of Japan Hidankyo. Ta.
Tanaka said there are currently 12,000 nuclear warheads around the world, 4,000 of which are operationally deployed and ready for immediate launch.
In his opening remarks, Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Jørgen Watne Fridnes said that the mission of atomic bomb survivors is more urgent than ever.
He said, “None of the nine countries that possess nuclear weapons — the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — seem to have any interest in nuclear disarmament or arms control at this point.” Ta. “On the contrary, they are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenal.”
Globally, $10.7 billion more was spent on nuclear weapons in 2023 than in 2022, according to a June report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
Fridnes said the committee urged the five nuclear-weapon states that signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France and Russia) to take their obligations seriously and encourage more states to ratify the treaty. He said he was asking for it.
“It is naive to believe that our civilization can survive in a world order where global security depends on nuclear weapons,” he said. “The world was not meant to be a prison where we await mass extinction.”
(Tanaka was 13 years old when the United States bombed Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after the first atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima.
Tanaka, who was in his home just a few miles from where the bomb fell, said he heard the bomber’s buzz and then was “surrounded by a bright white light.” A violent shockwave followed, crushing his home and others.
Three days later, when he and his mother went to look for the families of his two aunts, who lived near ground zero, he witnessed the utter devastation.
He discovered the charred remains of one of his aunts in the wreckage of his home, as well as the remains of her grandson, a college student. At my other aunt’s house, my aunt passed away just before I arrived, and my grandfather was on the verge of death with severe burns all over his body.
The uncle, who initially appeared largely unharmed, died after leaving the scene to seek help.
“The death I witnessed at that time could hardly be called a human death,” Tanaka said. “Hundreds of people were suffering without access to any treatment.”
“I strongly believed that such acts of murder and injury should never occur, even in war.”
Tanaka said the average age of atomic bomb survivors is now 85 years old, and he hopes the next generation will find ways to further develop their advocacy work.
“I hope that the belief that nuclear weapons cannot and must not coexist with humanity will be firmly established among the peoples of the nuclear-weapon states and their allies,” he said. Nuclear policies of national governments. ”
