From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, October 11th.

This year's Nobel Peace Prize winner was announced this morning. We're going to discuss the award now in the context of the

big sweep of history. We're making this headline, Thing Number 29 in our WNYC Centennial series

that we're doing on the show, 100 years of 100 things. It's 100 years of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The winner announced today is a Japanese group, if you haven't heard this yet,

called Nihon Hidankyo, made up of people who survived the atomic bomb attacks at the end of

World War II. The Nobel Committee cited the group, quote, for its efforts to achieve a world

free of nuclear weapons, unquote. As the New York Times describes them, Nihon Hadankyo has for decades represented

hundreds of thousands of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in

1945. These survivors, known as the Hibokusha, are living memorials to the horror of the attacks

and have used their testimony to raise awareness of the

human consequences of nuclear warfare. So this is a classic Nobel Peace Prize winner. By my

rough count, this is the eighth award since those bombing 79 years ago that have been for work

to prevent more nuclear attacks. I'll look at the winners of the two years

prior to this one shows other common categories for the Nobel Peace Prize. Last year,

Nargis Mohamedi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran. Two years ago, it was the Center for Civil

Liberties based in Ukraine for promoting people's right to criticize power and document human rights

abuses. So free speech and women's rights, human rights in general, two of the other things

that Nobel Peace Prizes are frequently awarded for. When Martin Luther King won

in 1964, he drew attention to the growing gap between different kinds of human aspirations. He

noted humankind's astonishing technological advances. He mentioned skyscrapers and spaceships,

for example, and yet...

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