The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Nihon Hidankyo for his activism against nuclear weapons. It is a Japanese organization of survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Joergen Watne Frydnes, president of the Norwegian Nobel committee, made the announcement Friday in Oslo.

He said the award was given to the organization “for its efforts toward a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating, through testimony, that nuclear weapons should never be used again.”

Efforts to eradicate nuclear weapons have already been rewarded in the past by the Nobel committee.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons won the Peace Prize in 2017, and in 1995 Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were recognized for “their efforts to diminish the role by nuclear weapons in international politics and, in the longer term, to eliminate these weapons.

This year, the prize was awarded against a backdrop of devastating conflicts raging around the world, including in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan.