The winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize landed in Oslo Sunday night and sent a direct message to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday: “Nuclear weapons are something that must never be used.” Their organization Nihon Hidankyo has also sent its message in writing.
“I don’t think President Putin truly understands what nuclear weapons are for people,” said Terumi Tanaka, speaking on behalf of the organization that will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Tuesday.
The 92-year-old Tanaka, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, said he’s frustrated by the threats being made by Putin and his foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, when they warn that they’ll use nuclear weapons in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Tanaka’s homeland of Japan is also regularly threatened by the dictator in North Korea, who’s now also sent troops into battle for Russia.
Tanaka and his fellow representatives from Nihon Hidankyo, Toshiyuki Mimaki and Shigemitsu Tanaka, took part in the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s annual press conference with Peace Prize winners. They were children when the US dropped atomic bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, quickly ending World War II but at a catastrophic price for Japanese civilians. The organization they founded in 1956, as part of a grassroots movement to eliminate nuclear weapons, won this year’s Nobel 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.”
Yet Putin and Lavrov continue to threaten use of Russia’s own nuclear arsenal, after invading its neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022 and launching a war that’s still dragging on despite huge human loss on both sides. That’s what prompted Terumi Tanaka to tell a packed auditorium at the Nobel Institute in Oslo that he doesn’t think Putin understands “what nuclear weapons are … therefore he says such things. We have to change his way of thinking and get him to understand what this is.”
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the new leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, quickly picked up on Tanaka’s statements, noting how it’s so important “to listen to the testimony” of the survivors of the nuclear attacks nearly 80 years ago, “again and again.” Frydnes stressed the it’s “crucial for humanity … that nuclear weapons are never used again.”
Tanaka, who was 13 years old when the atom bombs were dropped on Japan, admitted he was ” very nervous” about delivering the traditional acceptance speech for the Peace Prize, known as the Nobel Lecture. He never wants to miss an opportunity, though, to communicate what it was like to experience the consequences of nuclear warfare, and why it should never be experienced again.
Now he and other atom bomb survivors have become strong symbols of peace in their homeland and beyond. Tanaka condemned not only the threats from Russia but also from Israel at its leaders continue to destroy Gaza: “The threats are being made against the people in Gaza, so a gruesome nuclear attack can be repeated. In this situation, we feel threatened, too.”
“We are so old now, but we have been very frustrated over the situation,” Tanaka added. He hopes this year’s Nobel Peace Prize will send a warning to the entire world, that nuclear weapons “can’t be used to protect people. Atom bombs will never protect people. We are certain about that.”
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
