The Badly Tarnished Nobel Peace Prize is Finally Awarded to a Group that Truly Deserves It
But honoring the victims of the US atomic bombings of Japan comes as Russia threatens to use nukes, and the US pushes a war on Russia that could lead to nuclear disaster
Pity the Biden and Harris speechwriters tasked with composing a congratulatory comment for the head of state and the vice-head of state to offer to Toshiyuki Mimaki recipient of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize along with Nihon Hidankyo, the organization of Hibakusha. (Hibakusha are the victims of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
Those congratulations — if they are ever even offered — will have to be artfully composed. They would, after all, have to both praise Nihon Hidankyo’s decades of efforts to end nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war, and to shake the governments and peoples of the world out of an apathetic acceptance of nuclear weapons as just another fact of human existence, while the same time avoiding any mention of America’s horrific war crime of instantly obliterating two Japanese cities of no military significance, in the process killing a quarter million civilians.
The Nobel Peace Prize has long been tarnished. It was awarded to President Obama before he had spent a year in office with no significant peace initiative on his record, and before he became one of the more aggressive presidents in history in terms of projecting US military power unilaterally. Earlier the award was shared by war criminal Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the head of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (who refused to accept his honor and the money that comes with it), and Teddy Roosevelt, imperialist war monger of an earlier era.
But the shared Nobel award to Mimaki and Nikon Hidankyo is clearly deserved.
Shamefully, no American president has acknowledged this epic American war crime perpetrated at the end of World War II over the span of three days in August 1945.
In 2016, President Obama became the first and only president to attend a memorial of the atomic bombings in Japan, but while a controversial Nobel Peace Laureate himself, with the added obligation, it would seem, to emphasize the need to end 79 years of nuclear madness, he did not apologize for America’s two atomic bombings. Instead, he simply expressed his “sympathy” for the deaths caused by those two bombs.
The US officially continues to insist that the dropping of both bombs was necessary acts of war, allegedly required to bring it to an end, and to prevent the need for a US land invasion of the Japanese archipelago. It is a laughable position, as Japan’s navy and air force by Aug. 6 when Hiroshima was bombed had been totally destroyed, most of Japan’s cities, as well as its energy and transport systems destroyed, and its main army trapped in China, Manchuria and Korea with no resupply possible and no way to reach Japan. The government was at that point predicting massive starvation in the coming winter if the country were laid siege to and blockaded, making surrender only a matter or time.
Five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the top US general in World War II, well aware of Japan’s desperate condition by August 1945, opposed the use of the atomic bomb on the battered nation. In a memoir written in 1963 three years after he had left the White House, Eisenhower recalled telling Secretary of War Henry Stimson not to use the bomb, writing: “I was against it on two counts,. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
But with the example of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender as a precedent, President Truman and his foreign policy advisers demanded the same thing from Japan (and in fact this has become the US’s approach to all wars —a demand for unconditional surrender rather than a negotiated end).
It’s been 79 years since the first atomic bomb was tested in the Alamogordo Desert, the first atomic bomb was dropped in war on the city of Hiroshima, and the last atomic bomb dropped in war destroyed the city of Nagasaki. Indeed, those three bombs, all detonated within the a 24-day span between July 16 and Aug. 9, 1945 (if one excludes the subsequent decades of nuclear tests), might be viewed as a remarkably short nuclear era. However, as unlikely as this eight-decade interregnum without any nuclear war since then might seem, tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, warheads and shells have been constructed over that period by just the United States and the Soviet Union and later the post-Communist Russian Federation, not to mention the other seven nuclear powers.
But that nuclear war-free period has been anything but peaceful, and the fact that there has not been a nuclear war over a;; thos years has been a matter often of luck or the courage of individuals who refused launch orders or violated nuclear protocols at great personal risk.
Indeed the only reason nuclear weapons were not used in the early 1950s was that a handful of courageous American and British scientists who had helped make the first atomic bomb had made sure, by secretly sharing it, that the US was not the only country to have them. (One of the most consequential of those was Ted Hall, a teenage physicist at Los Alamos who worked on the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test and on Nagasaki, but also gave all the plans for that bomb to the Soviet Union, enabling the USSR to successfully test a copy in 1949. My book Spy for No Country: The story of Ted Hall, the teenage atomic spy who may have saved the world, published earlier this year by Prometheus Books, explains that amazing story.)
Today, the US is 14 years into a $1.7 trillion “modernization” program to build ten new nuclear-tipped missile-carrying submarines, each with enough explosive power to destroy not just a country but life on earth, an each capable of launching a devastating surprise first strike on Russia, China, Iran or any other state the US wishes to neutralize. That program is also modernizing the bombs themselves, to make them more “useable” by giving local commanders controlling the delivery systems the ability to dial the power of the explosions up or down. New missiles, new bombers, new army delivery systems, and other new weapons, as well as as front-line nuclear launch sites near to US “enemies,” are part of the program too.
At the same time the US is supplying hugely destabilizing and threatening weapons to Ukraine for use in its war with Russia, the only country with a nuclear arsenal roughly equal in destructive power to that of the US. These weapons would allow Ukraine to attack Russian targets, even using iUS satellite intelligence and guidance capability to direct their fire. Whatever one may think about Russia’s launching a war against Ukraine, a former part of the Soviet Union, the US is risking a global nuclear war by its actions.
The US is also the primary supplier of arms and military hardware like nuclear-capable F-35 and F-16 bombers and massively destructive and indiscriminate two-ton bombs to Israel which have in just on year killed over 42,000 trapped Palestinians in Gaza and which are now killing Lebanese civilians in a second war. That war has been declared by the UN’s International Court of Justice to be genocidal, making those who support it, like the US, equally guilty.
Toshiyuki Mimaki, who was three when the first US bomb struck his hometown of Hiroshima, speaking in Oslo to accept the award on behalf of himself and his Hibakusha organization, alluded to this when he said, after expressing joy when he learned he and his organization had won the Nobel Peace Prize:
“You hear countries making threats like, 'We will use nuclear weapons any time.’
"The United Nations has decided that there will be five countries with nuclear weapons, but more and more countries are acquiring them. The idea that the world is safe because there are nuclear weapons - we are absolutely opposed to this.
"It is impossible to maintain peace in the world in a world with nuclear weapons.”
He added, breaking into tears:
"Especially in places like Israel and Gaza, children are being covered in blood and living every day without food, having their schools destroyed, stations destroyed and bridges destroyed,”
"The people are wishing for peace. But politicians insist on waging war, saying, 'We won't stop until we win'. I think this is true for Russia and Israel, and I always wonder whether the power of the United Nations couldn't put a stop to it.”
He didn’t mention the US, the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, and, as Martin Luther famously said in his famous Riverside Church speech the year before his assassination, “the worst purveyor of violence in the world.”
I wish that in receiving this Nobel Peace Prize the Japanese recipients had acknowledged the 70,000 Koreans who had been forcibly removed from their country by the Japanese and who were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs were dropped. Those Koreans A-bomb victims were victimized by both the U.S. and the Japanese.