The Nobel Peace Prize was just awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese anti-nuclear weapons organization, reflecting its invaluable work to raise awareness about the horrific consequences of their use.

Shown here is an atomic cloud bursting over Hiroshima, two minutes after the bomb’s explosion, at 8:17am local time on 6 August 1945.

Over Nagasaki, an atomic cloud spreads across the city as seen from about three kilometres south of the hypocentre about noon local time on 9 August 1945.

Survivors of the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha, received medical treatment, including this man, woman and child, pictured in Hiroshima on 12 August 1945.

The remains of the building at the epicentre of the explosion in Hiroshima is called the Genbaku Dome and is now part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Genbaku means atomic bomb in Japanese.

UNESCO placed the memorial on its World Heritage List in 1996.

The UN has sought to create a nuclear-weapon-free world since its inception in 1945 shortly after the end of the Second World War and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The very first UN General Assembly resolution, adopted in January 1946 was titled Establishment of a commission to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy.

A hibakusha, one of the survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan, speaks at a special event in 2011 at UN Headquarters commemorating Disarmament Week, marked annually in October.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres made time to fold paper cranes with children at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. World leaders should be as clear-eyed as the hibakusha, seeing nuclear weapons for what they are: devices of death offering no safety, protection or security, he said. “The only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons is to eliminate them altogether.”