It was heartening to wake up to the news on Friday that Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.
These men and women serve as living symbols of the horror and unimaginable loss that occurred in August 1945 when the United States ushered in the nuclear age with attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The survivors alive today were just children when they witnessed their homes and neighborhoods transformed into heaps of rubble, corpses and raging fires. Though the damage occurred within a split second, the physical and psychological injuries remain nearly eight decades later.
My colleagues and I spent several days with hibakusha, as the nuclear survivors are called in Japan, listening to their recollections of living through those days and how they wrestle with those memories today for our Opinion series At the Brink, about the modern nuclear threat. (It was the second consecutive year that Times Opinion brought to light the subject of a Nobel Peace Prize winner’s work shortly before the award. Last year’s winner was Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian human-rights activist.)
With an average age of 85, the remaining survivors clearly recognized the importance of communicating their experiences and lingering trauma to future generations. It’s imperative, each one said, that world leaders can never be allowed to unleash such a catastrophe on innocent people again.
“The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its announcement.
The committee went on to applaud Hidankyo and other hibakusha’s efforts to emphasize the nuclear taboo, which hasn’t been broken since 1945. But the committee went on to point out the alarming fact that this taboo is currently under tremendous pressure.
This is a concern Times Opinion shares as the world’s nine nuclear powers expand and enhance their arsenals. Proliferation by new nations is coming closer to reality, and threats to use nuclear weapons are becoming commonplace.
Now, near the end of their lives, many hibakusha wonder whether the world has learned from their pain or whether a similar fate will befall another generation. Keiko Ogura was 8 when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
“Now what survivors worry about is to die and meet our family in heaven,” she told us. “I heard many survivors say, ‘What shall I do? On this planet there are still many many nuclear weapons, and then I’ll meet my daughter I couldn’t save. I’ll be asked: Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?’
“There is no answer I can tell them.”
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