Nobel Peace Prize 2024: Nihon Hidankyo And The Nuclear Taboo

This note covers the Nobel Peace Prize 2024, awarded to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo: who it is and what it has done, the historical background of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the idea of the "nuclear taboo", how the organisation's advocacy developed over nearly seven decades, why the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose it, and quick facts for exams.

What was the Nobel Peace Prize 2024 awarded for?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the prize to Nihon Hidankyo "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."

In plain words, this means the committee honoured a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors for two linked achievements. First, decades of campaigning towards the long term goal of eliminating nuclear weapons worldwide.

Second, using the first hand accounts of people who lived through the 1945 bombings to convince the world that such weapons must never again be used in war.

This recognition came through the Nobel Peace Prize, one of the prizes created under Alfred Nobel's will and administered from Oslo, Norway, rather than Stockholm where the other Nobel Prizes are presented.

The committee's citation deliberately links witness testimony to a practical outcome: strengthening a global norm against ever using nuclear weapons again, a norm the committee calls the nuclear taboo.

Who are the laureates?

The 2024 Peace Prize had a single laureate, an organisation rather than an individual, which received the entire prize.

Nihon Hidankyo

Nihon Hidankyo was founded on 10 August 1956 in Nagasaki, Japan. At the time of the award its base, or residence, was Tokyo, Japan. It received the whole prize share (1/1), meaning it did not split the award with any co-laureate.

Its full name in English is the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, shortened in Japanese to Nihon Hidankyo.

It was formed when local Hibakusha associations, groups of atomic bomb survivors, joined with victims of nuclear weapons tests carried out in the Pacific. Since then it has grown into biggest and most influential group of Hibakusha in the country.

Its contribution, as the committee describes it, was to turn personal suffering into sustained public advocacy: collecting thousands of witness accounts, issuing resolutions and appeals, and sending delegations every year to the United Nations and international peace conferences to press for nuclear disarmament.

What problem does Nihon Hidankyo's work address?

In August 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These killed an estimated 120,000 people immediately, and a comparable number later died of burn and radiation injuries. The cities were almost entirely destroyed, causing social and economic collapse.

Around 650,000 people survived the attacks. These survivors became known in Japanese as Hibakusha. For a long time their suffering was concealed and neglected: many struggled with psychological trauma and physical illness, and were silenced and stigmatised rather than supported.

According to the award ceremony speech, survivors had to struggle not only to secure their economic rights but simply to have their hardships acknowledged.

A decade later, in 1955, the intellectuals Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, together with other prominent intellectuals, issued a manifesto warning the world about the dangers of nuclear war and urging leaders to resolve conflicts peacefully rather than through weapons capable of mass destruction.

The manifesto appealed to humanity to "remember your humanity, and forget the rest," a phrase quoted by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in its 2024 ceremony speech.

By the time of the 2024 award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee warned that the situation had grown more dangerous again: nuclear powers were modernising their arsenals; new countries appeared to be seeking nuclear weapons, key arms control agreements were lapsing, and threats to use nuclear weapons in ongoing wars were being made openly.

The committee described this period as entering a new and more unstable nuclear age.

What did Nihon Hidankyo actually do?

Nihon Hidankyo's work rests on two main objectives, as stated by the Nobel Prize facts page: protecting the rights of survivors, and preventing any repeat of what happened to them.

To pursue the second objective, Nihon Hidankyo built an extensive programme of educational work based on personal witness statements describing the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. The organisation summarised its guiding aim in the motto "No more Hibakusha," meaning that no one should ever again suffer as the survivors did.

The organisation has provided thousands of witness accounts, issued public resolutions and appeals, and sent annual delegations to the United Nations and various international peace conferences, repeatedly reminding governments of the need for nuclear disarmament.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee placed this work within a longer history: it noted that thirteen Nobel Peace Prizes have previously been awarded, wholly or in part, to people and groups who worked to reduce the danger posed by nuclear weapons, and that on each such occasion the committee had issued a warning about that danger.

The 2024 award to Nihon Hidankyo was described as joining this distinguished list, at a moment when the committee judged its warning to be more urgent than before.

Why did the committee call this "the nuclear taboo"?

After 1945, a global movement emerged to raise awareness of the catastrophic humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons. Over time this built a powerful international norm, treating the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee calls this norm "the nuclear taboo," a term the political scientist Nina Tannenwald is credited with coining.

The committee said the Hibakusha's testimony is unique within this story, because personal survivor accounts "help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable" in a way statistics alone cannot.

The committee also pointed to one encouraging fact: "No nuclear weapon has been used in war in nearly 80 years," crediting Nihon Hidankyo and other Hibakusha representatives with helping to build and maintain that taboo.

At the same time, the committee warned that this taboo is fragile and under pressure, given modernising arsenals, possible new nuclear states, and open threats of nuclear use in current conflicts, including among the nine states known to possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

How did the work develop?

Nihon Hidankyo's advocacy did not emerge overnight. It grew from the lived experience of survivors across nearly eight decades, from the bombings themselves to the 2024 Nobel ceremony in Oslo.

Why does it matter?

The committee framed this prize as a reminder that nuclear weapons remain "the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen," with more than 12,000 now in existence, each far more powerful than the two bombs used in 1945.

The committee argued that the nuclear taboo, the unwritten but widely shared belief that using nuclear weapons is unacceptable, is a precondition for a peaceful future, yet it is maintained only through collective agreement and could weaken over time.

Because most Hibakusha are now elderly, the committee stressed that younger generations in Japan and elsewhere must carry forward the survivors' testimony and message, so the taboo does not fade once the original witnesses are gone.

The ceremony speech also paid tribute to the roughly half a million Hibakusha who had died in the decades since 1945, many of whom had given first hand testimony during their lifetimes.

The committee also called on the five nuclear weapon states that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty to honour their disarmament obligations, and urged wider ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

In the same speech, the committee referred to the portraits of past Peace Prize laureates hanging in its Oslo committee room, including Ales Bialiatski and Narges Mohammadi, the 2022 and 2023 laureates respectively, who the committee said were at the time serving long prison sentences for their human rights advocacy, and called for their release.

It noted, as an aside, that the same year's Literature laureate, the novelist Han Kang, was recognised partly for writing about trauma and memory, themes that the committee said echoed the ceremony's message about the duty to remember painful history.

Beyond the immediate recognition, the committee described a wider test facing the world: it said that none of the nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons appeared, at the time, interested in disarmament, and that each was instead modernising its arsenal.

Against this backdrop, the committee said disarmament would require sustained public pressure, insistent appeals and courageous political leadership, not only the testimony of survivors.

The committee also offered a long term vision, asking listeners to imagine a point a century after nuclear weapons were last used on a battlefield, and said this was a goal worth sharing even though the path towards it would involve both progress and setbacks.

It said the work mattered because it defended what it called the most basic human right, the right to live, and because it matched Alfred Nobel's stated wish to honour those who devote their lives to benefiting humankind.

How did past Nobel Peace Prizes relate to nuclear weapons?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee situated the 2024 award within a longer tradition of recognising work against nuclear danger.

In its ceremony speech, the committee said that thirteen Nobel Peace Prizes had, in full or in part, already been given for efforts of this kind, honouring people and groups who worked in different ways to reduce the threat that nuclear weapons pose.

The committee said that on each of these earlier occasions it had issued a warning about the dangers that nuclear weapons present to humanity, and that in 2024 it judged this warning to be more urgent than ever before, given the trends it observed: the modernisation of existing arsenals, signs that new states might be seeking weapons, the expiry of arms control agreements without replacement, and open threats to use nuclear weapons in current wars.

Within this pattern, Nihon Hidankyo's contribution was distinct because it rested on first hand witness testimony rather than only diplomacy or scientific argument.

The committee said the Hibakusha's role in building the nuclear taboo was unique, because their personal stories "humanise history," bridging the gap between people who lived through the bombings and those who did not.

The committee's broader point, stated in the speech, is that none of the nine states known to possess nuclear weapons currently appear interested in disarmament, which is why it called on signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to take their obligations seriously and urged more countries to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The committee's chair also described the year 2025 as approaching what he called a new and more unstable nuclear age, in which the role of nuclear weapons in international affairs was changing and key arms control agreements were lapsing without being renewed.

He described the nine states believed to hold nuclear weapons by name: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea, and said none appeared interested at that time in disarmament or arms control, but were instead building up their arsenals.

Why did the committee speak about memory and forgetting?

A large part of the 2024 ceremony speech was devoted to why remembering painful history matters, not only to survivors but to whole societies. The committee's chair said that how a society remembers violent or traumatic events decides whether it moves forward or stays trapped in the past.

He said both individuals and entire societies, present and future, are shaped by trauma, and argued it is a duty not to forget, including the disturbing parts of history that societies often prefer to let fade.

He noted that governments sometimes have reasons of their own to move on quickly, including avoiding accountability, while people not directly affected may find forgetting more comfortable because it spares them from engaging with others' suffering.

He also observed that survivors of violent events can feel two opposite fears at once: dread of what they remember, and dread of letting it slip away.

The speech linked this theme to the same year's Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to the South Korean novelist Han Kang, whose writing about trauma and memory was cited as part of why she was selected.

The speech quoted her as saying: "I believe that trauma is something to be embraced rather than healed or recovered from. I believe that grief is something which situates the space of the dead within the living; and that, through repeatedly revisiting that place, through our pained and silent embrace of it over the course of a whole life, life is, perhaps paradoxically, made possible."

The committee's chair said memories can imprison people and cut them off, but can equally become a catalyst for new life, a safeguard against forgetting, and a way of honouring those who suffered.

He said memory work could be an act of resistance and a force for change, and that it needed every institution of memory together: history writing, documentation, education, personal testimony, literature and art.

This framing explains why the committee treated the Hibakusha's witness testimony as something more than historical record, describing it instead as active work that keeps the nuclear taboo alive for generations who never experienced the bombings directly.

Quick facts for exams

The Nobel Peace Prize 2024 was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots organisation of atomic bomb survivors (Hibakusha), founded in 1956 in Nagasaki and based in Tokyo.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on 11 October 2024, citing its efforts for a world free of nuclear weapons and its use of witness testimony to show nuclear weapons must never be used again.

It received the whole prize, worth 11,000,000 Swedish kronor. The award ceremony took place in Oslo on 10 December 2024.

The organisation traces its origins to the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its work is linked by the committee to the idea of a global "nuclear taboo" against ever using such weapons again.

Note: Source. The prize facts in this note are from the Nobel Prize's official site, nobelprize.org.

Glossary

• Hibakusha — Japanese term for survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Nihon Hidankyo — the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, a grassroots movement of Hibakusha founded in 1956.
• Nuclear taboo — the international norm treating the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable.
• Norwegian Nobel Committee — the body based in Oslo that selects the Nobel Peace Prize laureate each year.
• Witness testimony — first hand accounts given by survivors describing what they experienced and suffered.
• Grassroots movement — an organisation built from ordinary citizens acting together, rather than led by governments.
• Non-Proliferation Treaty — an international treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and promoting disarmament.
• Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — an international agreement that bans nuclear weapons for its member states.
• Disarmament — the reduction or elimination of weapons, here nuclear weapons, held by a country.
• Radiation injury — harm caused to the body by exposure to radioactive energy released by a nuclear explosion.
• Nuclear arsenal — the stock of nuclear weapons held by a country.
• Prize share — the fraction of a Nobel Prize, and its monetary value, given to a laureate.

Common errors and misconceptions

• Misconception: Nihon Hidankyo was formed immediately after the 1945 bombings. Correct: it was founded in 1956, more than a decade later, after years in which survivors' suffering was concealed and neglected.
• Misconception: the 2024 prize went to an individual survivor. Correct: it went to the organisation Nihon Hidankyo as a whole, which received the entire prize share.
• Misconception: "the nuclear taboo" is a formal law. Correct: it is an informal international norm, maintained by moral opposition rather than binding legislation.
• Misconception: no nuclear weapon has ever been used since Nihon Hidankyo was founded. Correct: the committee's point is that none has been used in war since the 1945 bombings, which is nearly 80 years, a period that includes but predates the organisation's founding.
• Misconception: the citation only praises the goal of disarmament. Correct: it explicitly credits two things, the effort towards a world free of nuclear weapons and the use of witness testimony.
• Misconception: Hibakusha refers only to people in Hiroshima. Correct: it refers to survivors of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Misconception: the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony takes place in Stockholm like the other Nobel Prizes. Correct: the Peace Prize ceremony is held separately in Oslo, Norway.

Exam-style questions with model answers

Q1. In which year and city was Nihon Hidankyo founded? [1 mark]

1. Nihon Hidankyo was founded on 10 August 1956 in Nagasaki, Japan, when local Hibakusha associations joined with victims of Pacific nuclear weapons tests to form the organisation.

Q2. What does the term "Hibakusha" mean? [2 marks]

1. Hibakusha is the Japanese term for survivors of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, around 650,000 of whom survived the attacks.

Q3. State the official citation for the Nobel Peace Prize 2024. [2 marks]

1. The citation reads: "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."

Q4. What are the two main objectives of Nihon Hidankyo's work? [4 marks]

1. Nihon Hidankyo pursues two linked objectives. Nihon Hidankyo's first objective supports Hibakusha's social and economic rights, including those of survivors living outside Japan, who went without recognition for decades after the 1945 bombings.
2. The second is to ensure that no one is ever again subjected to the catastrophe the Hibakusha endured, which it pursues through educational campaigns based on personal witness statements describing the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, provided through thousands of testimonies and annual delegations to the United Nations.

Q5. What is the "nuclear taboo", who coined the term, and what four pressures currently threaten it? [6 marks]

1. The nuclear taboo is the international norm, built up since 1945, that treats the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. The term was coined by the political scientist Nina Tannenwald.
2. The committee said this taboo is maintained only by collective agreement and is fragile. It warned the taboo was under pressure because nuclear powers were modernising their arsenals, new countries appeared to be seeking nuclear weapons, arms control agreements were expiring, and threats to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare were being made openly.

Q6. Describe the historical background that led to the formation of Nihon Hidankyo, and discuss why the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose to honour witness testimony in 2024. [6 marks]

1. In August 1945, two American atomic bombs killed an estimated 120,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a comparable number later dying of burn and radiation injuries. Around 650,000 people survived as Hibakusha, but their suffering was long concealed and neglected, and many faced stigma rather than support.
2. In 1956, local Hibakusha associations and victims of Pacific nuclear tests united to form Nihon Hidankyo in Nagasaki, which grew into Japan's largest Hibakusha organisation, campaigning through witness accounts, resolutions, and United Nations delegations.
3. The committee chose to honour witness testimony because it saw personal survivor accounts as uniquely powerful in building and sustaining the global "nuclear taboo" against using nuclear weapons, at a time when the committee warned that taboo was under renewed pressure from modernising arsenals and open nuclear threats in ongoing conflicts.

Q7. What share of the Nobel Peace Prize 2024 did Nihon Hidankyo receive, and what was the total prize amount? [2 marks]

1. Nihon Hidankyo received the whole prize, a share of 1/1, out of a total prize amount of 11,000,000 Swedish kronor.

Q8. Name three Hibakusha representatives mentioned as present at the 2024 award ceremony, and state why the committee called such survivors living reminders. [3 marks]

1. Terumi Tanaka, Toshiyuki Mimaki and Shigemitsu Tanaka were the Hibakusha representatives named as present at the Oslo ceremony on 10 December 2024, alongside other Hibakusha guests.
2. The committee called them living reminders because their personal testimony bridges the gap between people who directly experienced the bombings and later generations who did not, keeping the memory of the suffering alive.

Key takeaways

• The Nobel Peace Prize 2024 went entirely to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese Hibakusha organisation founded in 1956.
• The citation credits efforts towards a nuclear-weapon-free world and the power of survivor witness testimony.
• Around 650,000 people survived the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as Hibakusha.
• Nihon Hidankyo pursues two objectives: survivors' rights and preventing any repeat catastrophe.
• The committee links the organisation's work to building the global "nuclear taboo."
• The committee warned this taboo is fragile and under pressure from modernising nuclear arsenals.
• The award was announced on 11 October 2024 and the ceremony held in Oslo on 10 December 2024.
• The prize amount was 11,000,000 Swedish kronor, awarded entirely to Nihon Hidankyo.

Test yourself

Where and when was Nihon Hidankyo founded?

It was founded in Nagasaki, Japan, on 10 August 1956.

What term does the Norwegian Nobel Committee use for the global norm against using nuclear weapons?

It calls this norm the nuclear taboo, a term coined by political scientist Nina Tannenwald.

Roughly how many people survived the 1945 atomic bombings as Hibakusha?

An estimated 650,000 people survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Who delivered the award ceremony speech for the 2024 Peace Prize?

Jørgen Watne Frydnes, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, delivered the speech in Oslo on 10 December 2024.

What was Nihon Hidankyo's share of the prize money?

It received the whole prize, 11,000,000 Swedish kronor, as the sole laureate.

What two main objectives guide Nihon Hidankyo's work?

It promotes Hibakusha's social and economic rights, and works to make sure no one ever suffers such a catastrophe again.

Which 1955 manifesto warned about the dangers of nuclear war?

A manifesto signed by Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and other intellectuals warned of the dangers of nuclear war and urged peaceful conflict resolution.