Obama will not apologize or second-guess Truman’s decision.
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Mr Obama said the memory of Hiroshima must never fade: “It allows us to fight complacencies, fuels our moral imagination and allows us to change”.
While not apologizing for America’s use of atomic weapons during World War II, Obama expressed remorse for the human toll of that war, and others throughout human history.
At least 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and another 74,000 three days later in a second bombing in Nagasaki.
“I think it is very significant that this is the first time U.S president visit to Hiroshima”, Kenzo Kato, 37, an elementary school teacher from Yamaguchi, said through a translator.
“If Obama apologised, I could die and meet my parents in heaven in peace”, he said at the peace park, from which ordinary citizens were later ejected amid tight security ahead of Obama´s arrival.
A majority of Americans see the bombings as having been necessary to end the war and save lives, although some historians question that view. Instead it is a signal that the commander-in-chief of the largest military in the world – and the commander of the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons – recognizes the awesomeness of their destructive power.
The park is located near ground zero of the Hiroshima bombing and features the iconic “A-bomb dome” – a burned out commercial exhibition building that was one of the few structures near the epicenter that remained standing.
At one point, Obama leaned in and gave Mori a gentle hug.
After his remarks, he met with two survivors, but his remarks to the aging men were out of ear shot of reporters.
Obama’s detractors in the Republican Party will be poring over the transcript of his speech for any shadow of an implicit apology, ready as ever to rain outrage on their sworn enemy in the White House.
Barry Frechette, a filmmaker who produced a recent documentary on Mori’s decades-long quest, said Mori and other survivors are not looking for an apology. We come to mourn the dead … their souls speak to us and ask us to look inward. “But we also heard what awful consequences were paid on the Japanese side, too, especially to civilians”.
Obama spoke broadly of the brutality of the war that begat the bombing – saying it “grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes” – but did not assign blame.
Obama’s visit is a moment 71 years in the making. “Help me!'” she said.
Obama’s visit followed a two-day summit with leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies in Ise-Shima in central Japan. Anticipation had been growing that Obama would visit Hiroshima after Secretary of State John Kerry become the highest-ranking Cabinet member to visit the city last month.
“Many people in Hiroshima feel the same way”. Most Japanese believe they were unjustified.
“Amongst those nations like my own that own nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them”, he said.
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Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. He received a Nobel Peace Prize early on his presidency for his anti-nuclear agenda but has since seen uneven progress.
