The Nuclear-Free Future Awards endeavor to ensure no-one has to

By Linda Pentz Gunter

If you are an activist in pretty much any area, you are rarely alone. The cliche, “it takes a village” applies. But it’s still possible to feel isolated and unheard, even by others in your own movement.

This is especially true for minorities and Indigenous activists, even those not necessarily working in remote areas or in countries most Westerners can’t point to on a map.

That’s why, to Claus Biegert, a founder of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards (and now a Beyond Nuclear board member), the World Uranium Hearing held in 1992 in Salzburg, Austria, was so important. Indigenous people from around the world were invited to testify about their daily experiences living with nuclear technology including uranium mining, nuclear weapons testing and radioactive waste storage.

As the people arrived, Biegert recalled, “you could see on all their faces they came from an isolated area and they felt alone and ignored.”

But at the end of the one-week conference, Biegert said, the participants left with “different faces because we helped them create a community.”

That moment gave birth in 1998 to the Nuclear-Free Future Awards, to keep that community together and to recognize the many who feel isolated and ignored, even as they do essential and often unpaid work to rid the world of nuclear dangers.

Accordingly, Tina Cordova, one of the 2023 recipients of the Nuclear Free Future Awards that took place last November at the Blue Gallery in New York City, said: “Obviously I have not done this work alone. So many other people have done this work with me, but what an honor to be recognized for the work you do, because this is my life’s work.”

Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, represents and advocates on behalf of the unrecognized, unwilling and uncompensated victims of the July 16, 1945 US Trinity atomic test in New Mexico.

Hinamoeura Cross, an activist from French Polynesia who campaigns on behalf of atomic test victims there, was equally surprised when she heard she had won the 2023 Award. “I cried,” she said, not so much for the honor itself but because, in what for her was a dark time, it reminded her why she does what she does. “I was wondering about my place in politics,” said Cross, who became a member of her country’s national Assembly last year. “This news was the light in the dark time I was in,” she said. “This reward reminds me why I got into politics — to defend the nuclear advocacy that unites us all.”

The French government conducted 193 atomic tests in the South Pacific, leaving a legacy of hitherto unknown illnesses and birth defects in the community. As one of her first acts as a politician, Cross secured a unanimous vote in the Polynesian Assembly in support of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Benetick Kabua Maddison, also a 2023 Nuclear-Free Future Award recipient, each of which comes with a $5,000 cash prize, is an exile from his homeland, the Republic of the Marshall Islands. He was brought to the United States as a child. His parents were exercising their right to automatic US residency and citizenship, an opportunity granted by the same US government that had made parts of their homeland uninhabitable after 67 atomic tests were conducted there between 1946 and 1958.

Today, Maddison is the executive director of the Marshallese Education Initiative (MEI) in Springdale, Arkansas, with a mission to educate young, exiled Marshallese, about what happened during and after the testing, as well as to keep their history and culture alive.

But, pointed out Maddison, “some of our staff at the MEI didn’t learn about the nuclear legacy until recently. Family members did not want to share their stories because it is too traumatizing for them. I understand this, but I also know that if we do not tell our story, it will be forgotten.”

Not forgotten was the remarkable legacy of the late Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Vietnam War whistleblower who released what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, but who was also a life-long outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons. His son, Robert Ellsberg, accepted an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award for his father at the 2023 Nuclear-Free Future Awards and said his father was also the most fearless person he knew.

Dan Ellsberg had risked life imprisonment in leaking the Pentagon Papers, which exposed US military decision-making to escalate the Vietnam War, strategies orchestrated by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration that were kept secret from the media and the American public. Their release helped harden opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War.

But Ellsberg was also a nuclear insider, and those memories, and the notes he kept, contributed to his last and possibly most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a nuclear war planner, effectively a memoir and published in 2018. Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023 at the age of 92.

Robert Ellsberg said that while his father generally eschewed honors and awards, this one was different, “because it’s not just to honor him but an assurance that his memory and his message will continue to inspire and fuel the on-going struggle for a world without nuclear weapons.” 

Dan, said Robert, would have viewed the people in the room that night as “his tribe, the truth-tellers, the peace-makers, the resisters who care about the others and who are prepared to do what is in their power to choose life and affirm the possibility of a different world.”

The next Nuclear-Free Future Awards event is currently planned for March 2025 in New City, to coincide, as the 2023 Awards did, with the Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons held at the United Nations. The Awards are co-hosted and operated by Beyond Nuclear and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

But before the 2025 Awards event can go forward, the funds need to be raised to host it and most importantly to provide the cash prizes for the three worthy winners. While these currently stand at $5,000 each, the goal is to double that amount for 2025. You can donate to the Award from anywhere in the world. Please visit the Nuclear-Free Future Awards website and click on “Your Donation” to give.

You can watch a short video about the 2023 Nuclear-Free Future Awards here, or the full unedited video of the entire ceremony here.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. Any opinions are her own.

Headline photo of Tina Cordova and Hinamoeura Cross by ©Adam Stoltman.