The Nobel Peace Prize has long been nothing more than the “Leftist Wet Dream Prize.” This year is another in that list, but it offends me more than many of those nonsensical awards because I take this one very, very personally because it went to a group that seeks to outlaw all nuclear weapons. These demands always attack the vulnerable consciences of the sane West while leaving weapons in the hands of nations like Iran and North Korea that aren’t deterred by mutually assured destruction.

From the beginning, the Nobel Peace Prize had a naïve edge regarding the awards. In 1910, it gave the Peace Prize to the Permanent International Peace Bureau. That worked out well..NOT. Woodrow Wilson, who got the U.S. into World War I, got a Peace Prize for his role in founding the League of Nations, which was utterly useless at preserving peace.

Image by AI.

Most awardees are obscure and forgotten names and, as often as not, their lauded efforts were useless. See, e.g., Ferdinand Buisson and Ludwig Quidde, who won in 1927 “for their contribution to the emergence in France and Germany of a public opinion which favours peaceful international cooperation.” Tell that to the French, circa 1940.

Some of the organizations we do remember have been sullied over time. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) won in 1917, 1944, and 1963. To say that the modern incarnation of the ICRC is a loathsome aggregate of antisemites is an understatement. It was useless to protect Jews during World War II and is now openly antisemitic under the guise of being anti-Zionist. A co-honoree in 1963 was the League of Red Cross Societies, the logo of which ostentatiously displays a cross and crescent because the organization has excluded Israel.

In the same grand antisemitic tradition, Desmond Tutu got the prize in 1984, while Yasser Arafat, a man who dedicated himself to killing Jews, got it in 1994. Oh, and in 1999, the anti-Israel Médecins Sans Frontières got a prize, too. Year after year, the UN as a whole and its various subsets keep getting prizes, too, despite their completely ineffectual peacekeeping around the world, their sexual abuse of women and children, and, yes, their antisemitism.

Things got really silly in 2007 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore won a Peace Prize for trying to destroy the modern world’s economy with their hysteria about Anthropogenic Climate Change. (Notably, all their predictions have proven wrong.) Like all good climate changistas, Gore never let his purported values get in the way of his luxury lifestyle. As John Kerry said of his jet-setting ways, he’s so important in the war against pollution that polluting is his “only choice” when it comes to fighting that war.

The nadir of the “Peace Prize” was the one awarded to Barack Obama in 2009 simply for the act of being. His beingness, of course, led to the implosion of the Middle East, the re-ascendance of the mad Mullahs in Iran, the collapse of racial harmony at home, and a general, shall we say, “edginess” in the world.

And always, beginning in the 1970s, the Nobel Prize committee has wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons.

• 1974: Eisaku Satō “for his contribution to stabilize conditions in the Pacific rim area and for signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
• 1982: Alva Myrdal and Alfonso García Robles “for their work for disarmament and nuclear and weapon-free zones.”
• 1985: International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War “for spreading authoritative information and by creating awareness of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war.”
• 1995: Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”
• 2005: International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.”
• 2017: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”

This year’s award is another in a long line of anti-nuclear efforts. The Prize went to a Japanese organization called Nihon Hidankyo, “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

BREAKING NEWS
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPeacePrize to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the peace prize for its… pic.twitter.com/YVXwnwVBQO

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 11, 2024

As for me, I’m a fan of nuclear weapons in the right hands. As with any weapon, nuclear weapons are simply tools. It’s the governments that wield them that matter.

In August 1945, my mother was a 21-year-old civilian dying in a Japanese concentration camp in Java. She’d dropped to 75 pounds and had lost interest in food, a sure sign that death was imminent. Dale Fitzgibbons’ father, having survived the Bataan Death March, was a slave in a POW camp on the Japanese mainland. The Japanese had just issued a “kill all prisoners order,” afraid that their escalating losses would trigger an uprising.

Meanwhile, in America, Harry Truman’s advisors told him—and subsequent investigation into Japanese records confirmed—that to win the war, American troops would have to invade Japan. Japan, in turn, would go into full defense mode, with every civilian an armed combatant. The estimates were 1,000,000 American casualties and at least that number of Japanese casualties over a year of fighting.

Alternatively, Truman could drop the atomic bomb. No American lives would be lost in a war that Japan started and waged with unprecedented brutality (having practiced on the Chinese and Koreans), and Japanese casualties would be lower than with a full ground war across Japan. Truman said yes, and the rest is history.

Japan lost roughly 200,000 civilians, which is always tragic. However, the war ended instantly, millions of Japanese did not die, and millions of American troops went home—and so did tens of thousands of civilians across Korea and the entire Malayan peninsula, whether Americans in the Philippines, Brits in Singapore and Malaya, and Dutch in Java. The survivors of the Japanese slave labor depredations against hundreds of thousands of people in Burma and Thailand went home, too.

And, not inconsequentially to us, at least, my friend Dale and I are here today. As I said, I take it personally. (So did the brilliant Princeton historian Paul Fussell, whose 1981 essay, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” is a must-read.)

Just as guns used wisely save lives, so do nuclear weapons.

There’s another parallel to guns, too: While law-abiding people willingly (and foolishly) disarm themselves as a way to end violence, outlaws and suicidal maniacs will not. The most that Nihon Hidankyo could do would be to force nations that have sat on their weapons for decades as part of a mutually assured destruction pact, because none want to die, to give up those same weapons.

Meanwhile, the rogues and madmen—the mullahs and the North Korean dictators—will never give up their programs. All that Nihon Hidankyo will have succeeded in doing is to make the world bow before them, as they wield their nuclear power over the rest of us.

And speaking of good guys and bad guys with bombs, this two-day-old video from India claims that Israel has already hacked into Iran’s nuclear program and can blow the whole system up at will. (Confession: I haven’t listened to the video, but my friend Dale did, and he says that’s the nub of it.) I have no other facts to offer, but it’s easy to believe this is the truth when you think about Hezbollah pagers and Israel’s cyberattacks on Iran’s centrifuges.