Risk of nuclear war rising amid global conflicts, Nobel peace laureate says

The winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize reaffirmed the need for the abolition of nuclear weapons by warning that conflicts raging all over the world, including in Gaza, are raising the possibility of a nuclear war.

Nihon Hidankyo, the grassroots group of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, won the prize on Friday for its “efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons”.

Shigemitsu Tanaka, a survivor of the American bombing of Nagasaki in 1945 and co-leader of the group, stated on Saturday that the “international situation is getting worse, and now wars are being waged as countries threaten the use of nuclear weapons.”

“I fear that we as humankind are on the path to self-destruction. The only way to stop that is to abolish nuclear”, the resident of Nagasaki told reporters.

Nagasaki was the second Japanese city that was hit by a US nuclear bomb on August 9, 1945, killing at least 74, 000 people. Three days earlier, the US bombing of Hiroshima had killed 140, 000 people.

Residents of Hiroshima expressed hope that the world will never forget 1945’s bombings, especially now.

Susumu Ogawa, age 84, was five when Hiroshima was almost completely destroyed by the bomb 79 years ago, and many of his relatives were among the tens of thousands of people killed.

“My mother, my aunt, my grandfather, and my grandmother all died”, Ogawa told the AFP news agency.

“All nuclear weapons in the world have to be abandoned”, Ogawa said. “We know the horror of nuclear weapons, because we know what happened in Hiroshima”.

He is saddened by what is happening right now in the Middle East, including Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon and rising tensions with Iran.

If the US and its allies permit Ukraine to launch long-range Western missiles into Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a signal in September that Moscow would consider using nuclear weapons to counteract.

“Why do people fight each other? … Hurting each other won’t bring anything good”, Ogawa said.

At the well-preserved Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Saturday, Japanese demonstrators gathered to support Palestinians in Gaza.

The group’s co-chief and a Hiroshima bombing survivor, Toshiyuki Mimaki, stated on Friday that the situation for children in Gaza was comparable to that in Japan at the end of World War II.

“In Gaza, bleeding children are being held]by their parents]. It’s like in Japan 80 years ago”, Mimaki told a news conference in Tokyo.

Nihon Hidankyo was formed in 1956, tasked with telling the stories of hibakusha, as the survivors are known, and pressing for a world without nuclear weapons.

According to residents, it is crucial that young people are still taught about what happened because the average age of the roughly 105, 000 hibakusha is 85.

Kiyoharu Bajo, 69, who was present at the Hiroshima memorial, expressed his hope that the Nobel Prize would “further spread the experiences of atomic bomb survivors around the world” and encourage others to visit.

There were many atom bomb survivors around me because I was born ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped. He claimed that he felt the incident as being “funny.”

Source: Aljazeera