Ban the Bomb Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition 2017 – ICAN

Ban the Bomb Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition 2017 – ICAN Exhibition texts A Titan II Missile in its silo at a former intercontinential ballistic missile site in Arizona, now the Titan Missile Museum. The Titan II was the largest and heaviest missile ever built by the United States. The missile was 31.3 m long and 3.05 m wide. It weighed 149,700 kg when fully fueled and had a range of 15,000 km. This is the last of 54 such missiles that were clustered in Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas during the Cold War; the rest have been destroyed. As seen from the Chinese side, a guard inside a sentry border post in North Korea, along a stretch of the border close to where experts suspect is a missile base at Yongjo-ri, said to be about 20 km inland from the border with the Chinese city of Linjiang. “Imagine if the only nuclear weapons remaining were the relics in our museums.” Mohamed ElBaradei - Nobel Lecture, Oslo, December 10, 2005 Although Nobel Peace Prize laureate a world we do not otherwise have access to: Mohammed ElBaradei’s words remain a dream, at border posts, in control rooms and on top many people and organizations are working to of missile silos. Sim Chi Yin’s unique series of turn them into reality. This year’s winner of the photographs named “Fallout” reflects people’s Nobel Peace Prize is one such driving force. experience of nuclear weapons – now and in the past. By putting the images from North Korea The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear and the US side by side, in diptychs, Sim Chi Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the 2017 Nobel Yin is looking for parallels – visual, historical, Peace Prize for its work to draw attention to factual, symbolic – between these landscapes, the catastrophic humanitarian consequences and she invites us to explore the situation in two of any use of nuclear weapons, and for its countries which stand opposed. ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons. Their slogan is Nuclear weapons represent a constant threat to “Ban the Bomb” and this is also the title of this humanity and all life on Earth. On August 6 and year’s Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition. ICAN works 9, 1945, the US dropped two atomic bombs over to persuade the world’s nation states and other the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. bodies to work together to stigmatize, prohibit The bombs killed hundreds of thousands of and eliminate every nuclear weapon on the planet. people, and injured many more. In connection with this year’s Peace Prize Exhibition, we We live in a world where the risk of nuclear have been allowed to borrow personal items weapons being used is greater than it has been that belonged to some of the victims of the for a long time. Together with this year’s Peace Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. A bag and Prize Exhibition photographer, Sim Chi Yin, an air-raid hood belonging to a 13-year-old we invite you to join us on a journey along the boy, a young student’s lunchbox, a rosary and a border between China and North Korea, and wristwatch that stopped at the exact moment the across six US states. With her sensitive and atomic bomb fell over the city. These personal perceptive eye, and equipped with a camera possessions bear witness to unimaginable human and a drone, photographer Sim Chi Yin reveals suffering and loss. “Hibakusha” means “bomb affected people” to achieve a world without nuclear weapons a in Japanese. Some of those who experienced new direction and new vigour. The organization and survived the attacks on Hiroshima and strives to encourage as many people as possible Nagasaki are still alive. Their voices can still be to engage in the fight against nuclear weapons. heard, and are important because they describe Inspired by ICAN’s efforts, we invite visitors to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of make their own contribution towards the goal a nuclear attack. In the series of photographs of a world free of nuclear weapons. taken by photographer Haruka Sakaguchi, entitled Project1945, we meet more than 40 A ban is possible. The dream can become reality. hibakusha. Read their stories and listen to their message for future generations. Director of Exhibitions, Liv Astrid Sverdrup The campaign for nuclear disarmament has been going on for more than 70 years. ICAN has breathed new life into this effort. In the essay “The Genie and its Bottle” that the historian The Peace Prize Exhibition is an annual tradition Alex Wellerstein has written especially for the and is the thirteenth in succession to be staged at the exhibition, he tells the story of the nuclear arms Nobel Peace Center. Work on the exhibition began race and the struggle for disarmament, now and the moment this year’s new Peace Prize laureate was in the future. announced October 6, and was completed December 11. The exhibition was officially opened December 11 The Norwegian Nobel Committee points out 2017. that ICAN has in the past year given the efforts A missile field in rural North Dakota, near the Canadian border which held Sprint and Spartan anti- ballistic missiles designed to intercept attacking nuclear warheads from Soviet missiles coming over the North Pole. These were deployed at the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex near Langdon, North Dakota, in the mid 1970s – a radar and anti-ballistic missile defence site which was shuttered by 1979. The city of Hyesan in North Korea’s Ryanggang province sits across the Yalu River from the Chinese border town of Changbai. Hyesan is 120 km from the Punggye-ri nuclear test site where North Korea is estimated to have conducted six underground nuclear tests since 2006. Japanese news reports in October (2017) said that a tunnel at the site had collapsed, killing as many as 200 North Koreans. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test, on September 3 (2017) recorded as a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in North Korea’s northeast. The Genie and its Bottle By Alex Wellerstein In the summer of 1945, not long before the “atomic energy” from atomic nuclei had been first atomic bomb was detonated, one of the contemplated for some time, the discovery that scientists who had worked to start the American the heavy uranium nucleus could be split at will, atomic bomb project appealed to a fellow possibly in huge cascades of chain reactions, scientist to oppose the use of nuclear weapons inspired many scientists globally towards the in combat. The other scientist declined: though idea that this science might have military and sympathetic with the idea that the use of atomic industrial applications. bombs in combat would put the world in a dangerous situation, he believed that, in some The fact that this discovery took place on sense, the best way to shock the world into the eve of World War II was not lost on the never using them again was to use them once, global scientific community. Between 1939 and in a horrible fashion. “I feel that I should do the 1941, scientists in France, Germany, Japan, the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we United States of America all approached their just helped it escape,” he concluded.1 governments to suggest that the splitting of atomic nuclei might have military implications, Can the nuclear genie be returned to its bottle? and recommend its further study. In the United The question has occupied minds since well States and United Kingdom in particular, before the bottle had even been fully opened. refugee scientists from Europe pushed for For some, the fearsomeness of the technology nuclear weapons development, fearing that the meant, paradoxically, that the world would never Nazis might be developing their own. be rid of it. For others, the same fearsomeness would prompt them to take action to oppose it The Manhattan Project relentlessly. Only the United States, with aid from the United Kingdom and Canada, actually pursued a full Science and the Atomic Bomb program to develop nuclear weapons for use The atomic bomb is an unusual case of a in the war, however. The Manhattan Project, scientific discovery leading very rapidly to as the effort was known, began in 1942, as massive international consequences. With the a partnership between US civilian scientists, atomic bomb, the time between the discovery of major industrial corporations and contractors, nuclear fission, the ability to split heavy atoms at and the US Army. The result was that by the will and release their energy, and its first use in summer of 1945, three nuclear weapons had military combat was only 6.5 years. been detonated: the first, a test detonation called “Trinity,” took place in New Mexico in Nuclear fission was discovered by a team of July 1945; the second and third took place over scientists working in Berlin, Germany, and the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in Stockholm, Sweden, in December 1938. Though early August 1945. The ending of World War it was the culmination of several decades of II several days later was attributed by many work by scientists to probe the inner secrets of to the use of the atomic bombs, but ignited atoms, its discovery was considered a dramatic a fierce and long-standing debate about the surprise. While radiation, nuclear reactions, appropriateness of using weapons that primarily and the possibility of releasing vast stores of injured and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the name of military strategy.

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