Hiroshima attack survivor receives Nobel Peace Prize

A leading activist in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, has likened her group’s aim with her struggle to survive the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Setsuko Thurlow, who was 13 when the bombing devastated her home city, spoke yesterday at the formal Nobel Peace Prize presentation in Oslo.

The group is a driving force behind an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons.

On Monday, 6 August, 1945, at 8:15am, the Little Boy nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima from an American Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, which was flown by Colonel Paul Tibbets.

The bombing directly killed an estimated 70,000 people, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 2,000 Korean slave labourers.

By the end of the year, injury and radiation had taken the number of deaths to between 90,000 and 166,000.

The city’s population before the bombing was 350,000.

About 70 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, and another 7 per cent severely damaged.

The public release of film footage of the city following the attack, and some of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission research about the human effects of the attack, were restricted during the occupation of Japan.

Ms Thurlow said the blast left her buried under the rubble of a school but she was able to see some light and crawl to safety.

“Our light now is the ban treaty,” she said.

“I repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima: ‘Don’t give up. Keep pushing. See the light? Crawl towards it’.”

The treaty has been signed by 56 countries – none of them nuclear powers – and ratified by only three.

To become binding it requires ratification by 50 countries.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ executive director Beatrice Fihn, who accepted the prize with Ms Thurlow, said, although the treaty is far from ratification, “now, at long last, we have an unequivocal norm against nuclear weapons.

“This is the way forward. There is only one way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons – prohibit and eliminate them.”

The other Nobel laureates announced in October – winners of the literature, physics, chemistry, medicine and economics prizes – were also due to receive their awards.