For atomic bomb survivors, a Nobel Peace Prize and a reckoning, 80 years later

Cities blasted to rubble. Burned bodies and flayed flesh. Invisible waves of radiation coursing through the air. And the indelible image of a mushroom cloud.

The atomic bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the world what an apocalypse looks like. Tens of thousands of people died in the immediate aftermath.

But some emerged from the devastation. Struggling with survivors’ guilt and sick with illnesses caused by the radiation, they were shunned for years as living reminders of the human capacity to engineer horror.

On Friday, Nihon Hidankyo, a collective of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The group was honored by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

The survivors of the bombings — more than 100,000 are still living — “help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the committee chair, said.

The Nobel committee noted that although nuclear weapons have not been used since the Japanese cities were attacked by American bombers in August 1945, nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals, and other countries are trying to join the nuclear club.

The committee did not name any specific nations. But President Vladimir Putin of Russia has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. And concerns are growing about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and Asia.

“At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen,” the committee said.

Other Nobel laureates have been awarded the Peace Prize for their campaigns against nuclear weapons, including chemist turned activist Linus Pauling in 1962 and the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005.

It was nearly 80 years ago, on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, that American B-29 bombers dropped two atomic weapons, code named Little Boy and Fat Man, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nobel committee said that about 120,000 people were killed by the detonations. A similar number died from burns, injuries and radiation-induced diseases in the months and years that followed.

That first and only use of nuclear weapons was followed by the end of World War II but also by a nuclear weapons arms race. In the deserts of China and Algeria and on the atolls of the South Pacific, nuclear powers tested increasingly more powerful weapons that spewed harmful radiation.

Today, nine countries are considered nuclear powers: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea. There are nearly 13,000 weapons in the global nuclear stockpile, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In Japan, the payloads dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki echoed far beyond the ruined cities. A once martial Japan blossomed into a culture that has dedicated itself, even in its constitution, to peace. Japanese children flashed peace signs for photos, and Olympic ceremonies in Japan featured white doves. But many Japanese felt more comfortable averting their gaze from the hibakusha, or “the people affected by bombs,” as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors are known.

For many in Japan — and in the United States — the hibakusha represented something that they didn’t want to see. When Terumi Tanaka, a representative of Nihon Hidankyo, visited the United Nations in 1976, he was shocked to discover that, at the time, the ruination caused by the atomic bombs was not that well known. The U.N. had drastically downplayed the death toll.

Some Japanese feared that radiation-induced diseases were contagious, and hibakusha worried about their marriage and career prospects. Sunao Tsuboi, the onetime chair of Nihon Hidankyo who was less than a mile from the center of the Hiroshima bomb when it went off, recalled that he and his fiancée took sleeping pills in a suicide pact after being told by her parents that they could not wed because he was a hibakusha. (They survived and married, and Tsuboi met President Barack Obama when he visited Hiroshima in 2016.)

“Starting with the inhumane acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we were oppressed by the United States and abandoned by the Japanese government for a long time,” Sueichi Kido, the secretary-general of Nihon Hidankyo and a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, told NHK, the Japanese broadcaster, on Friday.

When Nihon Hidankyo formed in 1956, its founding declaration described the stigma of outliving nuclear annihilation. “We have survived until now in silence, with our heads down,” the statement said.

In the years after the war, the hibakusha were living evidence of the fact that the United States, which occupied Japan after World War II and imposed upon the nation a constitution that renounced war, had caused the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The hibakusha were also a counternarrative to a Japan that was developing into a high-tech economic giant fueled, in some cases, by nuclear power. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which led to a meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, once again forced a national moment of reflection. Since the nuclear accident, most of Japan’s nuclear reactors remain shuttered.

These days, the hibakusha, whose largest grouping is Nihon Hidankyo, are celebrated for their continued campaign against nuclear weapons despite the obstacles. Many have dedicated their lives to recounting their stories of loss and pain, in an effort to ensure that the world comprehends the profound terror that a nuclear war could bring.

The Nobel committee said that such witness accounts “have contributed greatly to the establishment of a nuclear taboo.”

But that taboo, Frydnes said, “is under pressure.”

Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said in a statement that threats by both longtime nuclear powers and by newer actors show the crucial timing of the prize awarded to Nihon Hidankyo.

“In an era where automated weapon systems and AI-driven warfare are emerging, their call for disarmament is not just historical, it is a critical message for our future,” Urdal said.

In awarding the peace prize to Nihon Hidankyo, the Nobel committee said that even though the hibakusha are growing old, a new generation of Japanese could campaign for nuclear disarmament.

But Japan’s neighbors include Russia and China.

From Laos, where he was attending a regional summit, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan said it was “extremely significant” that Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ishiba, who was previously the country’s defense minister, has called for Japan to adopt a more muscular military stance. He supports revising Japan’s constitution to add a specific mention of Japan’s military, which is called the Japan Self-Defense Forces. The United States is treaty-bound to defend Japan if it comes under attack, and Ishiba, before he became prime minister, suggested that the United States could possibly share its nuclear weapons with Asia.

And while the Japanese public still overwhelmingly supports nuclear disarmament, some young people have expressed support for the nuclear deterrence theory, in which countries arm themselves to deter attack, a Nihon Hidankyo member told the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper.

Last year, at a summit in Hiroshima, the Group of 7 major industrialized nations released a statement that did not call outright for nuclear disarmament, instead urging that nuclear weapons “for as long as they exist, should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression and prevent war and coercion.”

But Toshiyuki Mimaki, chair of Nihon Hidankyo, said Friday that his foremost wish was for the world to “please abolish nuclear weapons while we are alive.”

Mimaki is 82.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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