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The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Has Been Announced

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  October 11, 2024 7:30 AM

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to a Japanese anti-nuclear weapon group Nihon Hidankyo, which consists of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors. 

The Nobel Committee gave the prize to the group “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.”

It comes at a time of conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine, when the “taboo against the use of nuclear weapon is under pressure," said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. 

"The nuclear powers are modernizing and upgrading their arsenals; new countries appear to be preparing to acquire nuclear weapons; and threats are being made to use nuclear weapons in ongoing warfare," the committee said. "At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen."

Efforts to eradicate nuclear weapons have been honored in the past by the Nobel committee. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons won the peace prize in 2017, and in 1995 Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs won for “their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.” (Associated Press)