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Published 11 October 2024 by LINO News

Nobel Peace Prize 2024

On Friday, 11 October 2024, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced to award the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo “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”.

Credit: Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach

“This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize 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 response to the atomic bomb attacks of August 1945, a global movement arose whose members have worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons. Gradually, a powerful international norm developed, stigmatising the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. This norm has become known as ‘the nuclear taboo’.

The testimony of the Hibakusha – the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – is unique in this larger context.”

“’Nuclear weapons [must] never be used again’ was also the appeal of the Mainau Declaration 2024 on Nuclear Weapons from July 2024. Its signatories warn that since 1955, the year of the first Mainau Declaration, “the number of countries with nuclear weapons, as well as the number of warheads and their destructive power, has increased ten-fold.” More than 100 Nobel Laureates from all disciplines and several hundred Lindau Alumni have signed the most recent Mainau Declaration.