Irwin Abrams edited four volumes of the Nobel Lectures in Peace (1971-2000) for World Scientific. Considered the global authority on the Nobel Peace Prize, he is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Antioch University. He lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Did you nominate anyone for the Nobel Peace Prize this year? If so, for what cause?
My own nominee is Senji Yamaguchi, a victim of the Nagasaki bombing himself who has been an international leader in the popular campaign to ban nuclear weapons. A prize for him would not only add to the Nobel pantheon of peace an extraordinarily courageous man who has given most of his life to the effort to prevent any future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, but whose vivid tellings of his own experience of sufferings can help the rest of us better understand just what a nuclear weapon can do to a human being.
To read the full text of the nomination, visit History News Network at http://hnn.us/articles/10148.html
What do you think of this year's Peace Prize winners, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei?
I had mixed feelings about the ElBaradei prize. I regretted that it was not given to the candidates the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and I had nominated, which could have given the world a graphic recognition of the suffering of individuals and their untiring work to prevent nuclear warfare. However, I was glad that on the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, the Norwegian Committee emphasized the nuclear threat and with the organization paired a man "fearless" and of integrity. ElBaradei has worked for peace standing up to great pressure. The 2005 prize for him was a prize against nuclear weapons, never more important than today, and consistent with the terms of Nobel's will. It was a prize for peace in my own terms.
However, I am opposed to prizes for organizations. Nobel intended his prizes to go to individuals, as his friend Baroness Bertha von Suttner pointed out to the executor when Nobel's will was being probated. She was the one who was responsible for Nobel including peace among his prizes. I have read their correspondence to one another, I was one of the first to do this, and I published an article about it, crediting the Baroness with more influence than earlier Swedish accounts had recognized. The executor told her that he agreed with her, but that the addition of organizations was a compromise that was necessary in order to deal with Swedish opposition to the will. Swedish royalists feared that the Norwegians, then a part of the monarchic union under the Swedish king, would use the Peace Prize to help win their independence from Sweden.
You had met and interviewed a number of peace laureates including Linus Pauling (the only person to receive two unshared Nobel prizes - for peace in 1962, for chemistry in 1954). What were you most impressed about Pauling?
I was fortunate to get to know Pauling better than most of those I interviewed.
He was a great genius, as a scientist has been ranked with Newton, Darwin and Einstein. Yet he was a modest man, no standing on ceremony with Linus Pauling. His eyes twinkled, and he had a good sense of humor.
He told me how he divided his time into three parts, one third to think about pure science, the other two thirds out of a sense of social obligation, on peace and human health. Was he confident about the future? "If I weren't," he said, "I would not be working on improving the human condition. I would spend all my time on science." It was at some sacrifice, then, that he didn't spend all his time in the lab.
He was not just an intellectual giant, but a man of morals and of integrity.
And of courage. In working to restrict atomic testing, he was considered pro-Communist in the Cold War, because the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in promoting such restrictions. He had to defend himself before Congress, and the State Department refused to let him leave the country to attend a science meeting in England, one in which certain information could have led him to discover DNA before those who got the Nobel science prize for this achievement.
All of his achievements impressed me, but what impressed me the most was that he was so human. His faith in science, but also in the ethical responsibility he felt that scientists had for the future of humankind. And that twinkle.
What is the greatest impact of the Peace Prize on the world?
In a time of so many conflicts and wars, so much brutality, so much egoism, so much of humankind at its worst, even in genocide, through this prize we are able to celebrate those who are judged to have won the most prestigious prize for service to humanity. This must give the world hope for the future.
Irwin Abrams shares his thoughts on the Nobel Peace Prize
