Nobel Peace Prize 2024 to Nihon Hidankyo, Voice of the Atomic Bombing Survivors
By Tariq Rauf
VIENNA, 8 October 2024: In recent years, the rhetoric, strategy and practice of nuclear deterrence has grown riskier, more urgent, more dangerous, less stable, and increasingly in the hands of deficient leaders and policymakers.
Today, 8th October, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to Nihon Hidankyo. This Japanese grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is deservedly “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”.
Hopefully, the leaders, policymakers and publics in the nine nuclear-armed States, as well as more than 30 allied States in defence arrangements underpinned by nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, can mend their ways and develop defence policies based on principles of common security.
Playing Nuclear Games
The ten States that have manufactured and test detonated nuclear weapons since 1945, each have received and/or provided assistance to other States – no existing nuclear weapon development and acquisition programme is truly indigenous or independent.
Furthermore, all ten nuclear-armed States have in place policies to use their nuclear weapons in circumstances assessed by them as threatening their vital security interests, sovereignty and territorial integrity; and in this context, all of them at one time or another have made implicit or explicit threats to use nuclear weapons.
On 26th September this year, at the commencement of the United Nations General Assembly’s annual high-level commemoration of the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, Secretary-General António Guterres warned that, “We are heading in the wrong direction entirely. Not since the worst days of the cold war has the spectre of nuclear weapons cast such a dark shadow”. He noted that nuclear-armed States “must stop gambling with humanity’s future” and must honour their commitments and obligations for nuclear disarmament…
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Personal comments by Tariq Rauf, former Head of Verification and Security Policy at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a former Member of the Group of Eminent Persons for Substantive Advancement of Nuclear Disarmament (EPG).
An earlier version of this opinion piece was published on 6 October, by Global Issues: Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All.