This year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be presented Tuesday to Japan’s atomic bomb survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo, which lobbies against the weapons now resurging as a threat 80 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

The three co-chairs of Nihon Hidankyo will accept the prestigious award during a ceremony starting at 1pm (1200 GMT) in Oslo’s City Hall, at a time when states like Russia increasingly threaten to break the international taboo on the use of nuclear arms.

“Nuclear weapons and humanity cannot co-exist,” one of the three co-chairs, Terumi Tanaka, told a press conference on Monday in the Norwegian capital.

“Humanity may come to its end even before climate change brings its devastating impacts,” the 92-year-old said.

Nihon Hidankyo works tirelessly to rid the planet of the weapons of mass destruction, with testimonies from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as “hibakusha”.

Around 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city on August 6, 1945.

A further 74,000 were killed by a US nuclear bomb in Nagasaki three days later.

Survivors suffered from radiation sickness and longer-term effects, including elevated risks of cancer.

The bombings, the only times nuclear weapons have been used in history, were the final blow to imperial Japan and its brutal rampage across Asia. It surrendered on August 15, 1945.

Tanaka was 13 when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing five members of his family.

On Monday, he expressed alarm at the resurgence of nuclear threats and urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop brandishing the threat to prevail in the war in Ukraine.

“President Putin, I don’t think he truly understands what nuclear weapons are for human beings,” he said.

Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki also known as Hibakusha, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

“Hibakusha is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its citation.

Witnesses to the only two nuclear bombs ever to be used in conflict have dedicated their lives to the struggle for a nuclear-free world.

“The Hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” the committee said.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has regularly put focus on the issue of nuclear weapons, most recently with its award to the ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, who won the award in 2017.

The Nobel Peace Prize, worth 11 million Swedish crowns, or about $1 million, is due to be presented in Oslo on Dec 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.