Nuclear warheads are threatening life on Earth as we know it. Just one of them could kill hundreds of thousands of people with lasting humanitarian and environmental consequences. A number of Nobel Prize laureates have been lauded for their opposition to the deadly arsenals that jeopardize our very existence.

“I suddenly heard the buzzing sound of a bomber jet, and was soon after engulfed in a bright, white light. Surprised, I ran downstairs and got down on the floor, covering my eyes and ears with my hands. The next moment, an intense shock wave passed through our entire house.” 

Terumi Tanaka was thirteen years old when an atomic bomb struck his home city of Nagasaki, Japan, on 9 August 1945. 

He remembers the overwhelming sight of blackened ruins and scattered corpses as he tried to find family members who lived near the hypocenter. “Many people who were badly injured or burned, but still alive, were left unattended, with no help whatsoever,” he explained, before describing the harrowing moment he found the “charred body” of his aunt and his severely burnt grandfather who was on the brink of death.

Tanaka is one of three co-chairpersons of Nihon Hidankyo, awarded the 2024 peace prize for warning future generations about the terrible consequences of using nuclear weapons. 

Tanaka’s family members were among the more than 200,000 people that died from the two atomic bomb blasts in Nagasaki and Hiroshima within years of their detonation. It is the only time that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict. Resulting in a massive loss in civilian life, they radically altered the landscape of warfare and their deadly legacy endures. 

The surviving victims, known as Hibakusha, have lived with health problems, lost loved ones and faced discrimination because of the atomic attacks. They were forced into silence by occupying forces following the end of World War II, and abandoned by the Japanese government.

Nihon Hidankyo gives Hibakusha an enduring voice. By harnessing the harrowing testimonies of survivors, the Japanese organisation seeks to educate others on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. The horrific memories include children with peeling skin and melted fingers, a little girl escaping Hiroshima by walking over dead bodies and the painful recollections of a 21-year-old unable to save crushed people from a collapsed building because of his burns. 

By taking these stories and their messages to the nuclear states and the United Nations they aim for no human to suffer like they did.

Warning about the consequences

Nihon Hidankyo is not the first peace prize laureate to warn against the medical, humanitarian and climatic consequences of using nuclear weapons. 

Several prominent laureates including Albert Einstein and Joseph Rotblat, a physicist who withdrew from the Manhattan Project (a collaboration between the USA and UK to create nuclear weapons) signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto against nuclear weapons. They called on human beings to “Remember your humanity and forget the rest”. 

Their warning was not heeded, and at the height of the Cold War a staggering 70,000 nuclear weapons threatened humanity’s survival. Two doctors from different sides of the Iron Curtain – Bernhard Lown from the US and Evgeny Chazov from the Soviet Union – who were united in their concern about the medical aspects of the use of nuclear weapons, began to speak out in the belief that they had a professional duty to oppose them. 

The two wrote to each other in the 1960s, when their home nations were on the brink of nuclear war.  The organisation that sprung up from their correspondence – the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) – received the Nobel Peace Prize 1985 for raising awareness of the human cost of nuclear war, which it described as the “final epidemic”.

By 1985 it had 135,000 members in 40 countries and held conferences to tell the world about the consequences of nuclear war and recommending a nuclear test ban. In his lecture, Chazov stressed: “It is not a political declaration of either communists or capitalists – it is what is demanded by reason, by people the world over who want to live.”

Diplomacy, dialogue and agreements

Instead of appealing to reason, some laureates have sought to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons with formal agreements and treaties. 

Chemistry laureate Linus Pauling dedicated his life to seeking the end of the arms race. He was one of the founders of the Pugwash movement, which received the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to diminish the role of nuclear weapons in the international political arena. He also helped to achieve the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, having personally reached out to two of the most powerful men in the world, on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

Pauling sent two telegrams in 1961; one to US President Kennedy, the other to Soviet Premier Khrushchev. He encouraged both leaders to continue the halt in nuclear weapons testing, and later sent a draft of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Khrushchev. The treaty, which bans nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater was signed in 1963 by the USA, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. It offered hope during the Cold War.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) – a coalition of non-governmental organisations in one hundred countries – has also looked to a treaty-based solution in its work to halt the use of nuclear weapons. The organisation was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. Earlier that year, as the culmination of its grassroots effort, 122 of the UN member states voted in favour of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

ICAN’s former Executive Director, Beatrice Fihn, said ICAN’s work shows ordinary people can make a real difference, by creating action that has contributed to negotiations and treaties that outlaw weapons of mass destruction. She described the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as “a light in a dark time” which provides a choice between two endings: “the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us.”

Rafael Mariano Grossi is Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was awarded the peace prize in 2005 for ensuring that “nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way”. 

Speaking at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum 2024, Grossi said, “world leaders, including those at the top of the multilateral system, have a duty and an irrevocable responsibility to work towards this [the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons].”

“When it comes to working on behalf of peace and security, playing it safe is dangerous,” Grossi said, calling for an urgent return to diplomacy and dialogue and on the leaders of international organisations to step up as effective brokers of peace.  

Working to control and reduce nuclear arsenals

Politicians and diplomats have played pivotal roles in controlling and reducing nuclear weapons arsenals and easing international tensions, including Eisaku Sato, Mikhail Gorbachev and Barack Obama.

Two peace prize laureates on opposite sides of the globe worked tirelessly in the pursuit of nuclear weapon-free zones. Alva Myrdal was in charge of disarmament issues in the Swedish government. In her book The Game of Disarmament, she expressed disappointment at the reluctance of the USA and the USSR to disarm, and fought for nuclear weapons-free zones in Europe believing that each individual country ought to take the initiative and ban nuclear arms on its territory. 

“It is of the greatest importance that people and governments in many more countries than ours should realize that it is more dangerous to have access to nuclear arms than not to possess them,” she said in her Nobel Prize lecture. “Without nuclear arms we run less risk of being drawn into the orbit of the great powers, with their hyper-dangerous weapons. And after all, there is no defence against them.”

Myrdal shared the Nobel Peace Prize 1982 with Alfonso García Robles, who played a key part in the laborious efforts to make Latin America a nuclear-free zone, following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, in which the USA and USSR came perilously close to using nuclear weapons. 

His work led to an agreement signed by 14 states in Mexico City in 1967 known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco. When the Latin American Nuclear Weapon Free Zone was established, it was the only one in existence to cover densely inhabited territories, joining only Antarctica, outer space and the sea bed as nuke-free zones. Over the years, these have been joined by more treaties that together ensure enormous areas in Asia and Africa are free of nuclear weapons.  

Hope for a nuclear bomb-free future

Despite the beliefs and actions of extraordinary individual laureates and organisations such as Nihon Hidankyo playing a major role in creating the “nuclear taboo”, the world is entering what many analysts characterise as a new, more unstable nuclear age, where the role of nuclear weapons in international affairs is changing. 

The nine nuclear powers are modernising and upgrading their arsenals, with approximately 12,500 nuclear warheads poised to cause catastrophic humanitarian and environmental damage, with consequences that span decades and cross generations.

Around 90% of them are owned by two countries – the USA and Russia – while there is an ever-present nuclear threat from countries that have never signed treaties and those with ‘secret’ nuclear programs threatening to intensify mistrust between nations and increase risks to civilians.

Key arms control agreements are expiring without being replaced, and threats to use nuclear arms in ongoing warfare have been made openly and repeatedly, with the United Nations describing nuclear weapons as “the most dangerous weapons on Earth.”

Terumi Tanaka from Nihon Hidankyo and other campaigners believe that by heeding warnings from the past, including the testimonies of the Hibakusha, humanity could be spurred into action to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and the threat of annihilation. Tanaka sent a powerful message in his Nobel Prize lecture:

“Ten years from now, there may only be a handful of us able to give testimony as firsthand survivors. From now on, I hope that the next generation will find ways to build on our efforts and develop the movement even further.”

Discover more

At the Nobel Peace Prize Forum 2024, three former Nobel Peace Prize laureates and leading experts on global nuclear politics discussed strategies to mitigate the risk of nuclear war and advance toward nuclear disarmament. The forum also hosted Hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who gave powerful testimonies.

Watch the Nobel Peace Prize Forum 2024 “NUKES – How to counter the threat” here

This article was published on 9 January 2025.