Nobel Peace Prize 2024 awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, Japan’s atomic bomb survivors organisation

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo on Friday — a Japanese grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The global movement was born in the aftermath of the atomic bomb attacks of August 1945.

"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize 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," read an official update.

The unique testimony of the Hibakusha – the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – have helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world.

“The Hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” the Committee added.

"Is it really true? Unbelievable! Never did I dream this could happen," Toshiyuki Mimaki — the co-head of Nihon Hidankyo — told reporters with tears in his eyes.

The Nobel announcements began on Monday with two Americans — Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun — winning the medicine prize. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton (considered to be founding fathers of machine learning) were awarded the physics prize on Tuesday. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry was announced on Wednesday with David Baker being awarded one half of the prize “for computational protein design”. The other half was given jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction”. Thursday saw South Korean author Han Kang secure the Nobel Prize in Literature for “her intense poetic prose”.

The prize is awarded annually by the Swedish Academy and worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million).