Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross is from French Polynesia. In her mid-thirties, she became an activist when she realized that her leukemia was a legacy of the 193 French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. She conquered her blood cancer and became a collector of unheard stories of suffering and ignored medical records. In doing so, she put pressure on the French government, which to this day lacks accountability. Hinamoera fights for recognition, medical care and financial compensation for victims. In May 2023, she was elected to the Polynesian Assembly of Representatives.

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In 2005, she and the late Fred Tyler founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC) to recognize those residents who experienced the fallout of the first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer’s Trinity, in southern New Mexico in 1945, but were not warned. As a sixth-generation indigenous/Hispanic resident who grew up in Tularosa, some 75 kilometers from the blast, she herself has conquered thyroid cancer. To date, the approximately 40,000 people, primarily Hispanics and Apaches, and their descendants have not been recognized as downwinders and thus exempt from compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA, a 1990 law). (*) Tina, a biology and chemistry major, and her team will not give up until TBDC’s mission is accomplished.

(*) After years of advocating by activists, the US Senate amended in July 2023 RECA to include downwinders from Tularosa Basin and area; the amendment still needs to pass the House of Representatives.

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Benetick Kabua Maddison, born in the Marshall Islands, now lives in the USA. Since 2022, he is the Executive director the Arkansas-based Marshallese Educational Initiative.The initiative sees its task in educating the US public, as well as the rest of the world, about the fatal effects of the 67 nuclear weapons tests conducted by the USA on the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. The history of the islands is a story of stillbirths, abortions, natural destruction and cultural decay. Benetick as a human rights activist, is a vocal supporter of the Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons, heard at many international conferences.

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Honor Award (lifetime achievement)

Daniel Ellsberg receives a posthumous lifetime achievement award. The world knows him as the senior of whistleblowers, when in 1971 (Nixon was U.S. president) he disclosed secret papers showing that the American public had been lied to about the Vietnam War. But before that, Ellsberg was among the White House strategists who discussed the question of nuclear first strike. In his last book , The Doomsday Machine, we witness the story of a man who started out as a peace lover and advanced to become a nuclear war planner before becoming a peace activist.

Ellsberg died in June of this year. His son Robert will accept the award.

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