The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki reflects a widely held fear that the planet has never been closer to nuclear war.
Within the past few weeks, Russia has lowered its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and warned the US and its allies that their backing for Ukraine risks leading them into a direct conflict with Moscow that could turn nuclear.
In the Middle East, Israel, which arms experts believe has about 90 nuclear warheads, is facing off against Iran. There is speculation it might strike facilities where it believes that Tehran, despite denials, is developing its own atomic weapons.
Illustration: Yusha
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un this week declared that his country would accelerate efforts to become “a military superpower and a nuclear power.” The Federation of American Scientists estimates that he already has 50 nuclear warheads.
“At a time when Russia is threatening to use nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapon states are rearming and arms control treaties are breaking down, this warning signal is needed,” said Ulrich Kuehn, an arms expert at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, praising the award of the Nobel prize to Japanese movement Nihon Hidankyo.
“Few Nobel Peace Prizes have been more timely, more deserved, more significant for the message they convey,” Norwegian Academy of International Law project supervisor Magnus Lovold said.
The accolade came before NATO was yesterday to launch its annual “Steadfast Noon” nuclear exercise, with F-35A jets and B-52 bombers among about 60 aircraft from 13 nations participating.
Opponents of nuclear weapons have long campaigned for their abolition on the grounds that firing one — either intentionally or as a result of an accident or miscalculation — could trigger a spiral of retaliation that would lead to the destruction of the planet.
Proponents say that because rival nuclear powers could wipe each other out many times over — a scenario that during the Cold War was referred to as “Mutual Assured Destruction” — that is what makes them the ultimate weapons of deterrence.
The two atomic bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II killed an estimated 120,000 people, while many thousands more died later of burns and radiation injuries. Today’s atomic weapons are many times more powerful than those used in 1945.
For decades — thanks in large part to the work of Nihon Hidankyo — the destruction unleashed on the two Japanese cities was widely seen as a lesson from history that using nuclear weapons again was too appalling to contemplate.
“We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the five “official” nuclear-armed states — Russia, the US, China, France and Britain — said as recently as January 2022.
The following month, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and experts started to shift their assessment of nuclear risks.
On the day of the invasion, Putin warned Russia’s enemies that they would suffer “consequences that you have never faced in your history” if they tried to get in its way.
In September 2022, he described the US nuclear attacks on Japan as having created a “precedent.”
In January last year, atomic scientists moved their “Doomsday Clock” closer than ever before to midnight, the theoretical point of annihilation.
Among many other signals to the West since then, Russia has announced the deployment of tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus, staged multiple rounds of nuclear exercises and scrapped its ratification of the global treaty that bans the testing of nuclear weapons — a pact that the US had never ratified in the first place.
Arms control experts say that conducting a nuclear test — something only North Korea has done this century — would be a dramatic escalatory signal.
Putin has said that Russia would not test unless the US does, and that it can win the war in Ukraine without resorting to nuclear weapons.
With the crumbling of the arms control framework that emerged from the ending of the Cold War, nuclear experts are concerned about the prospect of an accelerating weapons race involving not only Russia and the US, but China.
The last remaining pillar of US-Russian arms control, the 2010 New START accord that limits the two sides’ numbers of strategic nuclear warheads, is due to expire in February 2026.
Beatrice Fihn, former director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the Nobel peace prize in 2017, wrote on social media that she wept on hearing Friday’s news.
She said the award should be a spur to encourage more countries to join a global treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
“We still have some survivors with us, with firsthand experience of what these horrific, inhumane and illegal weapons do,” Fihn wrote. “We owe it to them to act now.”
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