Peace is urgent, Prize or no Prize 

Monument to the victims of the atomic bomb, in the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Photo: JOURNEY TO HERITAGE 

It is commendable that the Nobel Peace Prize 2024 has been awarded to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, which groups the survivors of the atomic bombings carried out by the United States against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.This should be a warning to those who encourage wars and exacerbate a climate increasingly conducive to the use of these weapons in today's heated conflicts.Those now recognized with the Nobel Prize are called "hibakusha", and identified as living memories of those acts of horror, whose perpetrators have never been punished by international organizations.Will there be any difference between those who died because of the U.S. atomic bombs and the victims of the massacre committed by Israel, the largest U.S. ally in the world, against the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank, of its attacks against Lebanon and Syria, and of its threats against the Islamic Republic of Iran?Although most of the survivors of that horror in Japan are over 80 years old, they do not lose hope that what happened in their country in 1945 will never be repeated anywhere on Earth.Now that the reality is so tense and suffocating, it should not be forgotten that the United States, when it dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - for no reason whatsoever, since World War II was coming to an end - killed more than 210,000 people as a result of the direct effects of both explosions, and thousands of others were, and continue to be, affected for life by the radiation to which they were exposed during the deadly attacks.Upon hearing the news about the Nobel Peace Prize award, Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), in an interview with CNN reacted by suggesting that the prize should not be awarded this year "because of the inability of world bodies to stop the wars in the world, mainly in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians".According to the Director of the Institute of Peace, "not awarding this year's prize would send the message that the institutions of the world order seem incapable of reducing conflict, and would highlight the deficiency in world politics at this time."