That of Which We Do Not Speak

Nihon Hidankyo’s history is a decades-long struggle for recognition. When they receive the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on 10 December, the rest of us will have one job only: Listen.

At precisely 11:00 a.m. on Friday, 11 October, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee, stepped up to the podium at the Nobel Institute in Oslo to announce that the nuclear bomb survivors' organisation, Nihon Hidankyo, would receive the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.” 

Less than an hour later, Farah Dakhlallah, spokesperson for NATO, posted a Rembrandtesque photograph of a Dutch F-35A aircraft on X.

“NATO kicks off its annual nuclear exercise Steadfast Noon on Monday,” Dakhlallah chirped to her 159,000 followers. The aircraft — evocative of a golden age of power and purpose — had recently been “certified” to carry nuclear bombs.

The jarring indelicacy of Dakhlallah’s announcement was not lost on the tweeting bystanders. The scheduling, if nothing else, of Dakhlallah’s kitschy display of a nuclear-capable bomber seemed, well, off.

“There is bad timing, there is dropping a brick … and then there is this,” remarked Wildfire, the nuclear ban movement’s agent provocateur. “Any comments from NATO on today’s announcement that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to … Nihon Hidankyo?” Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch inquired.

Dakhlallah did not reply, demonstrating through silence, perhaps, that she, and the organization she represents, attach little importance to the stories of those who, 79 years ago, found themselves on the receiving end of a nuclear attack.

Instead, NATO dispatched, a few days later, more than sixty aircrafts over Western Europe to practice how to put a nuclear weapon “onto a target”, as Colonel Daniel Bunch said. The Colonel did not clarify which “targets” that could conceivably warrant the use of nuclear weapons, and no one, it seems, cared to ask the question.

In stark contrast to Steadfast Noon’s thunderous spectacle, the members of Nihon Hidankyo tell a quiet story. At a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan a week after NATO’s exercise, 92-year-old Terumi Tanaka, one of the organisation’s three co-chairs, recounted how he, as a thirteen-year-old Nagasakian, learned what it means to be a nuclear target.

Tanaka’s testimony, like those of his fellow hibakusha, is exactly that: an unembellished account of the events as they unfolded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. Through their reports of shock, dread, grief, and guilt, the hibakusha’s gentle but unyielding voices have, over three-quarters of a century, sought to bring the world’s scattered attention into focus; insisting on a fundamental, factual truth: This happened.

One might think it a fool’s errand to try to sweep something as earth-shattering as a nuclear detonation under the rug. Yet, that is exactly what the U.S. initially attempted to do. For several years after World War II, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were prohibited from writing or even speaking about what had happened. Journalists, too, were initially barred from accessing the bombed-out sites.

“They did not want the victims to speak up about this atrocity,” Tanaka said. 

Truth, as the saying goes, is the first casualty of war. Facts established in its aftermath are often hard-won. The members of Nihon Hidankyo know this better than anyone.

The hibakusha’s resolve to tell their stories would eventually prevail over the censorship imposed by the U.S. and Japanese post-war governments. In the decades after 1945, the reality of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki gradually became known to the world, triggering widespread activism for nuclear disarmament.

But by then, the U.S. security policy establishment and others keen to maintain a role for nuclear weapons after the war had found a subtler, yet far more effective, way to discount their testimonies. Instead of censoring the stories emanating from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, security theorists discovered that they could extrapolate the horror and present it as a source of security. The theory of nuclear deterrence, which emerged as a powerful justification for the wild nuclear build-up of the Cold War, hypothesised that the threat to use nuclear weapons would, paradoxically, prevent their use. 

It was, of course, a serious case of theoretical overreach. By framing the world as locked in a catastrophic-sum game of mutually assured destruction, nuclear deterrence theorists effectively replaced the reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a fantasy world where nuclear weapons existed only as mental chips of intimidation and dominance. Lost in this world was any connection to the real experiences of real human beings; any concern with their humanity and their struggle for recognition; any regard, moreover, for military necessity and the laws of war, the application of which require a grounding in material reality. Nuclear deterrence created a madman’s dominion, premised on the unspoken threat to repeat the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a thousand times over.

Tragically, as Steadfast Noon demonstrates, the speculative logic of nuclear deterrence continues, to this day, to permeate the minds of the security policy establishment in the 43 countries that have not yet rejected nuclear weapons as a source of security. As a result, the world is no less locked in its psychotic stalemate today than it was during the Cold War.   

“People”, Tanaka said, still “don’t really understand the truth about the impact of nuclear weapons. They don’t really understand how much the victims have suffered”. 

Yet facts, once established, are stubborn things, and the testimonies of Nihon Hidankyo may still hold the potential to bring the nuclear-armed states to their senses. Indeed, testimonies of factual truth may be the only thing that can break the reality-detached spell of nuclear deterrence. But that requires people to listen to what they want to convey. 

“For decades, the members of Nihon Hidankyo have served as a human testament to the catastrophic human toll of nuclear weapons, telling a story that humanity needs to hear,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement on 13 October, perhaps seeking to correct the insensitivity of NATO’s spokesperson from a few days before. “On behalf of the United States, I congratulate them on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their historic work to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again.”

Biden might have heard the hibakusha’s testimonies, even been moved by their suffering, but had he really listened? After all, nearly eighty years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it remains U.S. policy to, as a last resort, do it all again.  

However sincere Biden’s willingness, as he declared, to “engage in talks with Russia, China, and North Korea without preconditions to reduce the nuclear threat,” Nihon Hidankyo has never asked for the nuclear threat to be reduced. Their demand is more radical. They ask for its removal.  

In total disregard of Nihon Hidankyo’s message, moreover, U.S. policymakers have—like their counterparts in the eight other nuclear-armed states—consistently rebuffed any attempt to consider the real-world consequences of these weapons in their disarmament and arms control efforts, insisting instead on viewing these weapons as an abstract means to “strategic stability.” The U.S. rejection, in particular, of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) — a treaty grounded in “the unacceptable suffering of and harm caused to the victims of the use of nuclear weapons” — suggests that they are not yet prepared to consider the moral, legal, and political implications of the hibakusha’s testimonies.

The only way to truly honour those who lived to tell the story of the horror that befell Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 would, quite obviously, be to accept their demand for all countries to join the TPNW and cease their attachment to nuclear deterrence. The members of Nihon Hidankyo are acutely aware that many of those who have visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and heard their stories have only, like Biden, absorbed half of their message. If truth is the first casualty of war, the political agency of its victims is, sadly, often the second.

The Japanese Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, came closer than Biden to recognising Nihon Hidankyo’s political project. He acknowledged, at least, that the organisation “has been working for many years toward the abolition of nuclear weapons” and even signalled that Japan would “seriously consider” participating in the next meeting of the parties to the TPNW — a treaty that Japan, despite being the only country to have suffered a wartime nuclear attack, has still not signed. 

But Ishiba, too, ultimately failed to take in the import of Nihon Hidankyo’s message. Nuclear deterrence represents “a pragmatic response”, he reportedly told Tanaka in a phone call, as the latter questioned Japan’s continued support for the retention and possible use of U.S. nuclear weapons on its behalf. The Prime Minister did not seem to reflect on what “a pragmatic response” means for someone who has suffered a nuclear attack. 

Many were those who, upon hearing the 2024 peace prize announcement, regarded the decision as an uncontroversial one. “The decision to recognise Nihon Hidankyo means the Nobel committee has steered away from more controversial nominees for the peace prize”, BBC reported.

But the framing of the 2024 peace prize as uncontroversial is only possible if one disregards, at some level, what Nihon Hidankyo are, in fact, saying.

“What we advocate is not always listened to,” Tanaka said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. The notion, in particular, that the use of nuclear weapons can, in certain circumstances, be permissible, and that Japan needs this threat for its defence, “is the complete opposite of what Nihon Hidankyo is advocating,” he had to clarify.

When Nihon Hidankyo receive the peace prize in Oslo on Tuesday 10 December, the rest of us will have one job only: Listen. Not seek to reframe. Not opine. Not hypothesise. Just listen.