In a commentary released late Thursday, North Korea’s official KCNA news agency called Obama’s trek to Hiroshima an act of “childish political calculation” aimed at disguising the president’s true nature as a “nuclear war maniac”.
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According to figures released in April, almost 1.5 million people visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 2015 – the year that marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing. From a distance, Obama will take in the iconic A-bomb dome, a building skeleton that’s come to represent the scale of destruction the bomb imparted.
Abe is speaking at a wreath-laying with Obama in the city where the USA dropped the first atomic bomb.
Obama’s subdued trip to Hiroshima is expected to last less than three hours.
“It’s bad that so many people got killed in Hiroshima, but it was a necessity to end the war sooner”, he said.
He is now the first sitting US president to make the trip that his predecessors have avoided. Japan, despite advocating disarmament, relies on the US nuclear umbrella for extended deterrence.
“The Japanese government is portraying Japan as a victim country through Obama’s Hiroshima visit and diminishing the facts of Japan’s invasion in the past”, Hiroshima student Morita Hirotaka told Xinhua.
Trump said yes he would debate Sanders ahead of the California primary, but “how much is he going to pay me?” The Nuclear Security Summit and all the work that we’ve done on that score has made it less likely that nuclear materials fall into the hand of terrorists or non-state actors. Obviously, it’s not as prominent in people’s thinking as it was during the Cold War, at a time when our parents or grandparents were huddling under desks in frequent drills. “But the backdrop of a nuclear event remains something that I think presses on the back of our imaginations”.
“Given Hiroshima’s sensitive identity, the Japanese government is trying to use the historic visit to highlight Japan’s image of a “war victim”, while downplaying its role as an aggressor in World War Two”, China’s state news agency Xinhua said.
Members of his administration have adamantly insisted he will not apologize for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which claimed a quarter-million lives; “he will recognize the painful past, but he won’t revisit it”, according to an essay published today in The Atlantic, “Hiroshima and the Politics of Apologizing”. He’s hoping Obama’s visit will help promote world peace. The Iran nuclear deal is a big piece of business – because without us having to fire a shot, we were able to persuade a big, sophisticated country that had a well-developed nuclear program not to develop nuclear weapons. And Obama has been accused of hypocrisy for his proposed trillion-dollar overhaul of American’s own nuclear weapons program.
Obama arrived in Hiroshima after addressing USA and Japanese troops at nearby Marine Corps station.
Obama has said he will honour all who died in World War Two when he visits Hiroshima, accompanied by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, but will not apologise for the bombing of Hiroshima.
The US has around 47,000 personnel stationed in Japan as part of a security alliance that arose from American occupation in the aftermath of World War II.
Less than four months into his first term, Obama gave a speech in Prague where he pledged the USA would “take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons”.
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Concerning Hiroshima, Abe said he was looking for Obama to “express the feelings of sorrow” at the Peace Memorial Park, where the President will tour alongside his Japanese counterpart. Abe was noncommittal when asked Wednesday after meeting with Obama if he would visit Pearl Harbor.
