For Atomic Bomb Survivors, a Nobel Prize and a Reckoning, 80 Years Later

Cities blasted to rubble. Burned bodies and flayed flesh. Invisible waves of radiation coursing through the air. And the indelible image of a mushroom cloud.

The atomic bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the world what an apocalypse looks like. Tens of thousands of people died in the immediate aftermath.

But some emerged from the devastation. Struggling with survivors’ guilt and sick with illnesses caused by the radiation, they were shunned for years as living reminders of the human capacity to engineer horror.

On Friday, Nihon Hidankyo, a collective of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The group was honored by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for “demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

The survivors of the bombings — more than 100,000 are still living — “help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the committee chairman, said,