Nobel laureate warns Putin about danger of nuclear weapons

OSLO: This year´s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Japan´s atomic bomb survivors´ group Nihon Hidankyo, on Monday urged Russia to stop issuing nuclear threats in a bid to prevail in its war in Ukraine.

“President Putin, I don´t think he truly understands what nuclear weapons are for human beings,” said Terumi Tanaka, the 92-year-old co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo and a survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

“I don´t think he has even thought about this,” Tanaka told a press conference in Oslo a day before he was due to accept the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, with two other co-chairs, at a formal ceremony in Oslo on behalf of Nihon Hidankyo. Putin began making nuclear threats shortly after Russia´s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and signed a decree in late November lowering the threshold for using atomic weapons. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated on Thursday that Moscow was ready to use “any means” to defend itself.