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

The news of the American bombers dropping atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was met with great dismay by Otto Hahn, then newly awarded Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry. At the time a prisoner of war, he witnessed how his discovery of fission had laid the foundation for the development of atomic weapons through the Manhattan Project (a collaboration between the USA and UK to create nuclear weapons).

Hahn decided to commit himself to the preservation of peace, and in a major radio speech in 1955 he warned politicians from both sides of the Iron Curtain of the dangers of nuclear weapons. Seeing the arms race continue, he turned to other scientists for support. Together with physics laureate Max Born, he initiated the Mainau Declaration at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Within a year, the declaration had 52 signatories worldwide.

Another powerful document was the Russell-Einstein Manifesto against nuclear weapons, signed by several prominent laureates including Albert Einstein and Joseph Rotblat, a physicist who withdrew from the Manhattan Project. 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.”