President Barack Obama traveled to Hiroshima, Japan, on Friday, marking the first time a USA president has visited the site of the world’s first nuclear attack, which was carried out more than 70 years ago.
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“Seventy-one years ago on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed”, Obama said.
News presidential historian Michael Beschloss compared the President’s Hiroshima speech to that of “John Kennedy at the American University – so close to where we are now in 1963 and that was given with the same motive which was that was a time when talks about a test-ban treaty had been installed”.
“We remember all the innocent killed in the arc of that awful war and wars that came before, and wars that would follow”.
“We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner”.
Mr Obama’s visit to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park had all the pomp, ceremony and planned choreography of a state visit or a leader’s funeral. He paused before the memorial’s cenotaph, his head bowed.
Obama has said he will honor all who died in World War Two but will not apologize for the bombing of Hiroshima.
Some 145,000 died by the end of that year.
“We must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them”, he said, although he quickly added: “We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe”. “We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see”. We listen to silent cry.
“It’s a chance to reaffirm our commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a [world] where nuclear weapons would no longer be necessary”. What a precious thing that is.
Leading up to that, Mitchell pointed out that the current President has shown an interest in nuclear disarmament since he took office but lamented has made little progress since the most recent conference in D.C. “because Vladimir Putin – the other great nuclear power and the other curb on proliferation after the Cold War was the Soviet Union wasn’t present, was boycotting because of other tensions, tensions over Ukraine”. Abe says he sincerely respects Obama’s courage in deciding to visit Hiroshima. He says he and Obama are determined to realize a world free of nuclear weapons, no matter how hard that is to achieve. At the time, the overwhelming majority of Americans supported President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan to hasten the end of the war, while most of the Japanese believe that the U.S.’s use of the bombs was unjustifiable. Though there had been calls for an apology, public reaction to the visit and the speech was overwhelmingly positive.
The old adage of MAD for Mutually Assured Destruction is now better termed SAD for Self Assured Destruction as whomever would unleash such an attack would put their own people at risk from this climate change becoming de-facto suicide bombers.
Abe, in his speech, called Obama’s visit courageous and long-awaited.
President Obama laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Friday, telling an audience that included survivors of America’s atomic bombing in 1945 that technology as devastating as nuclear arms demands a “moral revolution”.
His choreographed visit will be parsed by people with many agendas.
The pilgrimage drew a less sympathetic response in other Northeast Asian countries where historical disputes with Tokyo over wartime and colonial aggression remain raw. “Obama is seized with the wild ambition to dominate the world by dint of the USA nuclear edge”, the agency said. The Chinese media had acerbically reminded that Japan is trying to be the victim in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japan had been forced to admit the war guilt, but the people from South Korea and China through south-east Asia have neither forgiven or forgotten Japan’s war crimes against the people of this region.
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Obama will try to navigate those shoals by saying less, not more. China says Japanese troops in 1937 killed 300,000 people in its then-capital of Nanjing.
