This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Tuesday to Nihon Hidankyo, Japan’s atomic bomb survivor group, which lobbies against weapons that have emerged as a threat 80 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Nihon Hidankyo’s three co-chairmen will accept the honor during a ceremony at Oslo’s City Hall starting at 1pm (1200 GMT), at a time when states such as Russia threaten to break the international ban on the use of nuclear weapons. are giving
“Nuclear weapons and humanity cannot coexist,” Terumi Tanaka, one of the three co-chairmen, said at a press conference in the Norwegian capital on Monday.
The 92-year-old said, “Humanity may reach its end before climate change has catastrophic effects.”
Nihon Hidankyo works tirelessly to rid the planet of weapons of mass destruction, with testimonies from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as “habakusha”.
On August 6, 1945, approximately 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city.
Three days later, an American atomic bomb killed another 74,000 people in Nagasaki.
Survivors suffered from radiation sickness and long-term effects, including elevated risks of cancer.
The bombing, the only time nuclear weapons have been used in history, was the final blow to imperial Japan and its brutal rampage across Asia. He surrendered on August 15, 1945.
Tanaka was 13 when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing five members of his family.
On Monday, he expressed concern over the resurgence of nuclear threats and urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop playing up the threat of a preemptive war in Ukraine.
“President Putin, I don’t think he truly understands what nuclear weapons do to humanity,” he said.