Director's Statement on the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize
by Kevin P. Clements
The Toda Peace Institute congratulates Nihon Hidankyo for being awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. Nihon Hidankyo is an organisation of Hibakusha from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have long argued for a world free of nuclear weapons using their own tragic experience and suffering to argue strongly for a total taboo on the production, distribution or use of nuclear weapons.
The announcement comes ahead of next year’s 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings on the two cities, which killed a combined estimate of 210,000 people.
As a Japanese Peace Research Centre, the Toda Peace Institute, welcomes the award to a Japanese organisation and looks forward to cooperating with Nihon Hidankyo and its co-chair Toshiyuki Mimaki in our common cause of ensuring that nuclear wars can never be won and must never be fought.
Nihon Hidankyo, which means the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, dates back to 1956. It was originally aimed at campaigning against the 1954 Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb test that exposed the crew of the Fukuryū Maru No. 5 to radioactive fallout.
It is right and proper that the Nobel Committee award their 2024 prize to this organisation. The few remaining survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will not be around forever to give personal eye witness accounts of the indiscriminate use of such weapons on civilian populations. It is good, therefore, that they have been honoured for their anti-nuclear witness.
Because Russia and other countries have started to erode the nuclear taboo by threatening the use of such weapons in Ukraine and elsewhere, the Toda Peace Institute stands in solidarity with all Hibakusha and Nihon Hidankyo for constantly reminding us that the use of these weapons is illegal under international law and must never be used in war ever again.
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