Rash: Nobel Peace Prize honors atomic-bomb survivors while warning of today’s dangers

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Conflicts across continents make this an era of war hawks. But on Friday an alternative avian avatar — an origami crane — took flight. It’s the symbol of Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots group of Japanese atomic-bomb survivors that was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it “wishes to honor all survivors who, despite physical suffering and painful memories, have chosen to use their costly experience to cultivate hope and engagement for peace.”

Beyond honoring, the award was a warning, too. “The nuclear powers are modernizing and upgrading their arsenals,“ the committee stated. “New countries appear to be preparing to acquire nuclear weapons; and threats are being made to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare. At this moment in human history it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.”

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki 79 years ago, “a global movement arose whose members have worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons,“ stated the committee. “Gradually, a powerful international norm developed, stigmatizing the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. This norm has become known as ’the nuclear taboo.’ ”

But unfortunately, ”so much has been done in recent years to erode the nuclear taboo, which has been widely believed to be one of the few things that has really helped restrain leaders from using nuclear weapons,“ said Lesley M.M. Blume, a journalist, historian, and author of the compelling 2020 book “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.”

That journalist was John Hersey, whose ”Hiroshima,“ an extraordinary exposé of the blast’s lasting effects, shocked the conscience of the world and changed the way the weapon was perceived when Hersey’s work was published in the New Yorker a year after the bombing.

Writing after a world war that took millions of lives, Hersey avoided the abstract of the hundreds of thousands immediately or eventually killed by the blasts by focusing on just six survivors.

Those survivors’ stories, as well as the testimony from members of Nihon Hidankyo, have impact. “Their story is beyond devastating; it’s almost beyond imagining,“ said Blume. “And even though they’ve been recounting their stories for decades, they never lose their horror. They really are one of the most important guardrails that we have against use of nuclear weapons in warfare.” While their testimonies are on paper, Blume continued, “meeting somebody who survived, or hearing them in person or on television — it’s very impactful.”

Indeed it is, as I experienced in a 2014 reporting trip to Japan. In Hiroshima I interviewed three survivors who miraculously avoided the fate that met most of their family and friends. Some facial burns were still visible. Even more visceral, however, were emotional scars that still seared each survivor, whose iron will seemed as indestructible as the steel beams of the iconic “Atomic Dome,” a U.N. World Heritage Site that is one of the only remaining structures still standing at ground zero.

”Most human-rights change that we experience and have witnessed over time has been driven by the tireless work of survivors and those who share their values — that’s what moves us to policy, to take action,” said Carrie Booth Walling, director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota. Awarding Nihon Hidankyo ”is deeply consistent with the core values of the Nobel Peace Prize, whose purpose is really to honor some of the most impactful work being done to secure peace, protect human dignity and better mankind.”

It also, continued Walling, “serves as a powerful signal that we’re at a moment where we’re much too close to the brink of possible nuclear war.“ The selection ”is also intended as a powerful reminder of the horrific impact and incredible human cost of nuclear-weapon use.”

That a reminder is needed is striking. But the current conflicts raging across the world, as well as transnational threats like climate change and pandemics, seem to take up all the geopolitical bandwidth, even amid the global glare of America’s presidential campaign.

”I’m really dismayed that there were no nuclear questions about the threat during the presidential debate,“ said Valerie Plame in an interview last week when she was in Minnesota speaking at Macalester College, Norway House and the Women’s Club of Minneapolis. Nuclear issues were Plame’s area of expertise at the CIA before her cover was blown by the George W. Bush administration during the debate over Iraq.

With an arms-control treaty with Russia set to expire next year just at the advent of a nuclear era marked by A.I., malign actors and hypersonic delivery systems, Plame said, the nuclear issue “has changed significantly and yet we don’t seem to be talking about it.”

And not only not talking about nuclear weapons but even general geopolitical issues. ”Diplomacy seems to be tougher now,” Anniken Huitfeldt, Norway’s ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview while she was in Minnesota this week. Some ”people believe in isolation as a strategy,” continued Huitfeldt, who added that ”this is not the Norwegian way of working for peace and reconciliation.”

The ambassador pointed to Norway’s noted role in negotiations regarding Colombia, a peace process that resulted in then-President Juan Manuel Santos winning the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize “for his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end.”

Diplomacy is essential to defuse the nuclear threat too, and efforts have won seven previous Peace Prizes, including in 2017, when the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won ”for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”

Being named a Nobel laureate “gave us a huge confidence boost and the platform attention,” Beatrice Fihn, who was ICAN’s can-do leader when it won, told me in a 2022 interview. ”So we were really about to mobilize a much bigger movement. And to get that kind of recognition for the work gives us strength to tackle those problems, even though it’s very long-term work.”

Fihn said ”we were just a bunch of regular people, just completely normal, with small budgets and little workshops, and we managed to do something that got the Nobel Peace Prize. And to me, that’s also a signal that we shouldn’t underestimate just working together as communities. You don’t have to be a president or a prime minister to make a difference in this field.”

Indeed, sometimes just being a survivor, like the members of Nihon Hidankyo trying to turn origami cranes into peace doves, is enough to merit a well-deserved, and well-timed, Nobel Peace Prize.