This year's Nobel Peace Prize winner is not a person, but an organisation - Nihon Hidankyō is a Japanese movement that has been calling for nuclear disarmament for nearly 70 years. Dr. hab. Arkadiusz Modrzejewski, prof. UG, Director of the Institute of Political Science, tells us why the Nobel Committee has now decided to honour these efforts.

The choice of this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate was not accidental and should not come as a surprise. Although almost eighty years have passed since the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the topic has by no means lost its topicality - on the contrary, since the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine, discussions have flared up anew as to whether the world is threatened by a global nuclear war. As the Norwegian Nobel Committee pointed out in its justification, Nihon Hidankyō's message is a universal one, reminding us how deadly an instrument modern man has at his disposal and what inhuman suffering this causes.

The President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, and his ministers, diplomats and propagandists, but not only that, because we still have the unaccountable North Korean regime, have more than once in recent years mentioned the possibility of using nuclear weapons, and that this is the first step towards the annihilation of the world - certainly the world as we know it. By honouring Nihon Hidankyō, the Nobel Committee is sending two things out into the world. First, a warning signal, perhaps not yet a red light, but certainly an orange light, calling for reason and moderation. It is a request to put the brakes on sinister declarations of war. It also sends an olive branch, urging peace and reconciliation in the name of universal respect for human life as the supreme value. The Japanese survivors of the nuclear Armageddon are a living testimony to both unimaginable suffering and reconciliation in the name of peace.