This year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate has warned that escalating conflicts around the world, including in Gaza, are increasing the possibility of nuclear war, prompting renewed calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Nippon Hidankyo, a grassroots organization of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, received the award on Friday for its “work to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
On Saturday, Shigemitsu Tanaka, a survivor of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki and co-chairman of the group, said, “The international situation is increasingly deteriorating, and with countries threatening to use nuclear weapons, war is now on the rise.” “We are aware of this,” he said. ”.
“I’m worried that we, the human race, are on the road to self-destruction. The only way to stop it is to abolish nuclear power plants,” a woman living in Nagasaki told reporters.
Nagasaki was the second Japanese city to be attacked by a nuclear bomb by the United States on August 9, 1945, killing at least 74,000 people. Three days ago, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people.
Hiroshima residents said Saturday they hope the world never forgets the 1945 atomic bombing.
79 years ago, 84-year-old Susumu Ogawa was five years old when the atomic bomb nearly destroyed Hiroshima, and many of his family members were among the tens of thousands of victims.
“My mother, aunt, grandfather and grandmother all passed away,” Ogawa told AFP news agency.
“All nuclear weapons in the world must be abandoned,” Ogawa said. “We know the horror of nuclear weapons because we know what happened in Hiroshima.”
Current events in the Middle East, including Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and rising tensions with Iran, sadden him.
Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested in September that Russia would consider responding with nuclear weapons if the United States and its allies allowed Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with long-range Western missiles.
“Why do people fight? Nothing good comes from hurting each other,” Ogawa says.
On Saturday, Japanese demonstrators rallied at the Atomic Bomb Dome, preserved in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Toshiyuki Mimaki, the group’s co-chair and a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor, said Friday that the situation for children in Gaza is similar to the situation in Japan at the end of World War II.
“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held by (their parents). It’s like Japan 80 years ago,” Mimaki said at a press conference in Tokyo.
Nippon Hidankyo was founded in 1956 and its mission is to tell the stories of hibakusha, also known as hibakusha, and to work for a world free of nuclear weapons.
With the average age of the approximately 105,000 survivors still alive today at 85, residents said it was important to continue educating young people about what happened.
Kiyoharu Umagami, 69, who visited the Hiroshima Memorial, said he hoped the Nobel Prize would help “further spread the experience of atomic bomb survivors around the world” and persuade others to visit the memorial. He said that
“I was born 10 years after the atomic bomb was dropped, so there were many atomic bomb survivors around me. This incident felt close to my heart,” he said.
“But that’s going to be an issue in the future.”
