Eirini Karamouzi, University of Sheffield, Luc-André Brunet, The Open University

The 2024 Nobel peace prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots organisation created by survivors of the two US atomic bombs that were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The Norwegian Nobel committee recognised the organisation “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”.

Discussion of the bombings, which killed more than 100,000 Japanese people, was largely a taboo in the immediate post-war period. This was, in part, thanks to American press censorship in occupied Japan.

But, in 1954, an American nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean produced such extensive radioactive fallout that it affected a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, causing one death from radiation poisoning.

The Lucky Dragon incident prompted many of the atomic bomb survivors, who are known as the hibakusha, to speak out about their experiences. And it was within this context that Nihon Hidankyo was created in 1956.

Since then, the hibakusha have played an immeasurable role in activism against nuclear weapons worldwide. Their testimony, the Nobel committee said, has “helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world”.

In 1975, for example, a group of hibakusha that included Setsuko Thurlow, a member of Nihon Hidankyo and a globally renowned campaigner against nuclear weapons, organised an exhibition on the atomic bombings at the Toronto public library.

This helped trigger the development of a significant anti-nuclear movement in Canada. By the early 1980s, tens of thousands of Canadians regularly demonstrated against their government’s support for US nuclear weapons.

Then, in 1984, another survivor of the Hiroshima bombing called Takashi Morita co-founded a hibakusha organisation based in São Paulo to share their stories and raise awareness in Brazil of the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons.

Growing awareness of the experiences of the hibakusha throughout the 1980s inspired Europeans to protest against the deployment of new nuclear missiles in their countries.

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https://theconversation.com/nobel-peace-prize-awarded-to-japanese-atomic-bomb-su