Toshiyuki Mimaki was beside himself with joy when he found out that the atomic bomb survivors’ group that he co-chairs had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but later pushed back tears of sorrow as he pictured children bleeding from their wounds in Israel and Gaza.

The Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs at the end of World War Two, won the award on Friday in what was seen as a plea to nuclear-armed countries not to use those weapons.

While Mimaki said the prize would give a major boost to his group’s efforts to demonstrate that it was possible to abolish nuclear weapons, he acknowledged that many countries seemed uninterested in seeing a world without them.

“You hear countries making threats like, ‘We will use nuclear weapons any time’,” he said in a live interview on public broadcaster NHK hours after the prize was announced.

“The United Nations has decided that there will be five countries with nuclear weapons, but more and more countries are acquiring them. The idea that the world is safe because there are nuclear weapons - we are absolutely opposed to this.

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