Early in October 2024, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award of two major prizes: the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese grassroots peace organisation Nihon Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations), and the literature prize to the Korean novelist, Han Kang. From both winners came messages addressed to our troubled times. There is little early indication that they would be heard.

The peace prize to Hidankyo was belated recognition of the struggle by surviving victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing and subsequent Pacific nuclear testing, a struggle beginning soon after the dust settled over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and as organised national and international movement from the founding of Hidankyo in 1965.

Probably no one would dispute that Hidankyo’s Nobel Peace prize award is well deserved, but it comes very late. For roughly eight decades from 1945, the testimony of Japanese and Pacific nuclear victims spearheaded the demand that nuclear weapons be abolished. As of 2024 it has still to bear fruit.

In the 21st century, the ranks of hibakusha survivors shrink steadily. The youngest are now in their 80s. The award to the Hidankyo organisation of atomic bomb survivors in 2024 was the fourth time the Nobel Committee has recognised the work of anti-nuclear organisations, following Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985), the Pugwash Conferences (1995), and ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2017). However prestigious and many the prizes and however worthy the cause, however, human civilisation remains precariously tethered to the existence of nuclear weapons.

And yet, as is well-known, nuclear weapons exist, stockpiled in the hundreds or thousands by nine countries (the five “Great Powers” of the Security Council headed by US with an arsenal of some 5,000 weapons, followed by Russia, United Kingdom, France, and........

© Pearls and Irritations