Anti-nuclear campaigners tipped for Nobel Prize
By Alister Doyle
OSLO, Oct 6 (Reuters) – The 2005 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday is likely
to honour work to contain nuclear weapons 60 years after the
U.S. bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Norway’s NRK television said on Thursday.
The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog and its head, Mohamed ElBaradei,
U.S. senator Richard Lugar and former Senator Sam Nunn and a
ban-the-bomb group representing Japanese survivors of the 1945
U.S. bombings seemed the frontrunners, it said.
The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce its choice at
0900 GMT on Friday in Oslo from a secret list of 199 candidates.
NRK’s veteran correspondent Geir Helljesen, who has often correctly
tipped the winner of the annual prize, said on the main evening news
that the committee was likely to find “the fight against nuclear
weapons both central and topical.”
Worries about the nuclear programmes of North Korea and Iran and fears
that weapons of mass destruction could fall into the hands of
terrorists were likely to guide the choice.
Last year, Helljesen pointed to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari
Maathai as a likely winner of the award, set up in the 1895 will of
Swedish philanthropist Alfred Nobel. The prize is worth 10 million
Swedish crowns ($1.29 million).
Helljesen mentioned the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) and ElBaradei, Lugar and Nunn for their work to dismantle
ageing nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and Japan’s Nihon
Hidankyo, which represents atom bomb victims.
NO GELDOF, BONO
Helljesen dismissed speculation that Irish rock star Bob Geldof might
win the prize for campaigning against poverty in Africa, saying that
he was not even among nominees. He said that Irish rocker Bono had
been nominated but would not win.
An anti-nuclear prize in 2005 would seem to confirm a trend on major
anniversaries of Hiroshima.
In 1995, British ban-the-bomb scientist Joseph Rotblat won with his
Pugwash organisation. In 1985, the award went to a U.S.-Soviet group
of doctors, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear
War.
Centrebet, an Australian Web site which was first to accept bets for
the prize in 2003, rates the IAEA favourite at 3-1 with both Nihon
Hidankyo and the Nunn-Lugar team among the top four.
Helljesen merely noted that Centrebet had also suggested Finnish
President Martti Ahtisaari, the bookmaker’s second favourite for his
work to broker a peace deal between Indonesia and Aceh rebels.
The Norwegian Nobel Institute says that it has cracked down on leaks
and notes that Helljesen is sometimes wrong, like in 1995 when he
failed to predict Rotblat’s prize.
Some peace researchers say the IAEA has done too little to merit the
prize amid standoffs with Iran and North Korea. Others say a prize to
the IAEA could encourage limits on the spread of nuclear arms after
the end of the Cold War.
Helljesen mentioned Hidankyo but not its co-chair Senji Yamaguchi,
also tipped for the prize. Yamaguchi was 14 when the bomb fell on
Nagasaki.
“I saw many children die, and when I fled to the mountains that day I
saw bodies with … internal organs coming out and faces split in
half. I saw many such bodies,” Yamaguchi told Reuters in an interview
at a Nagasaki home for the elderly.
“That is why I want to somehow eliminate nuclear weapons — for me
that is everything,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Takanori Isshiki in Nagasaki)
10/06/05 18:33 ET