Awards: Nobel Prize winner warns against breaking nuclear weapons taboo

The Japanese anti-nuclear weapons organization Nihon Hidankyo has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Its three co-chairs, Terumi Tanaka, Shigemitsu Tanaka and Toshiyuki Mimaki, received the Nobel medal and diploma at a ceremony in Oslo City Hall. All other Nobel Prize winners, including Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, later received their awards at another event in Stockholm.

Nihon Hidankyo is a grassroots movement of survivors of the nuclear weapons dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in October that it would honor the organization, founded in 1956, for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through eyewitness testimony that nuclear weapons should never be used again.

In view of threats to use nuclear weapons, for example from Russia, Terumi Tanaka warned in the Nobel Lecture on behalf of his organization that there was a risk of breaking the “nuclear taboo”. One must remember that there are 4,000 ready-to-use nuclear warheads in the world today. They could cause immediate damage that could exceed that of Hiroshima or Nagasaki by a hundred or thousand times.

Prize winner: Coexistence of nuclear weapons and humans not possible

Tanaka expressed his hope that the conviction among citizens of nuclear weapons states and their allies that nuclear weapons and humanity cannot and should not coexist. “Don’t let humanity destroy itself with nuclear weapons,” he said. “Let us work together towards a human society in a world free of nuclear weapons and free of wars!”

The USA dropped the devastating weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. An estimated 120,000 residents were killed in the two drops, and a similar number also died from burns and radiation injuries in the months and years that followed. To date, these have been the only uses of nuclear weapons in a war.

However, according to the Stockholm peace research institute Sipri, the world’s nine nuclear powers have been modernizing and upgrading their nuclear weapons arsenals for some time. The trend for nuclear warheads to be kept ready for use is accelerating: According to Sipri, of the estimated 12,100 nuclear warheads in the world, more than 9,500 were in military stockpiles for potential use at the beginning of the year. Around 3,900 of these warheads were mounted on missiles and aircraft – around 60 more than a year earlier.

Further winners announced in Stockholm

While the Nobel Peace Prize is traditionally the only one presented in Oslo, all other laureates were later presented at another lavish ceremony in Stockholm by the Swedish King Carl XVI. Gustaf excellent. This time there were ten male researchers and the South Korean writer Han Kang, the only woman: The 54-year-old received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life,” as the official award citation states is called. She is the first Nobel Prize winner for literature from South Korea.

Of the award winners in the science categories, basic AI researchers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were first honored in the physics award category. They were followed by protein researchers David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper in the chemistry category, as well as Nobel Prize winners in medicine Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who were honored for the discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation. After Han, prosperity researchers Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

It is tradition in Oslo and Stockholm that the Nobel Prize winners, announced in October, receive their awards on December 10th: this is the anniversary of the death of the prize founder and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). This year, the honors are once again associated with prize money of eleven million Swedish crowns (around 950,000 euros) per category.