Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers from six other leading nations ended two days of talks Monday in Japan with what Kerry described as a “gut-wrenching” visit to the site of the world’s first atomic bombing.
Advertisement
Secretary of State John KerryJohn KerryUS Embassy warns of planned attack at Kabul hotel Kerry encourages Obama to make historic visit to Hiroshima No apology from Kerry during Hiroshima stop MORE suggested President Obama is eyeing a potentially historic trip to Hiroshima next month, when he will be visiting Japan for an worldwide summit.
On Monday morning, the G7 ministers and the foreign policy chief of the European Union visited the memorial museum, which shows the devastating impact of the bombing – such as survivors’ burned clothing and other personal effects. The talks are in preparation for a summit meeting of G-7 leaders in Ise-Shima, Japan, in late May.
He has become the first sitting secretary of state to visit the memorial site, after the city was hit by a USA nuclear bomb in 1945.
Mr Kerry toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, whose haunting displays include photographs of badly burnt victims, the tattered and stained clothes they wore and statues depicting them with flesh melting from their limbs. The bomb led to the end of World War II and killed 140,000 people.
It is highly significant that the Group of Seven major powers – including the three nuclear powers of the United States, Britain and France – issued a clear message to pursue the eradication of nuclear weapons, doing so from a city flattened by the atomic bomb. The destructive effects of these nuclear bombings still linger today as manifested in the affected regions’ rates of radiation sickness, cancer, and birth defects.
In the Hiroshima Declaration, the G7 foreign ministers reaffirmed their “commitment to seeking a safer world for all and to creating the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons”.
“If you’re asking whether the secretary of state came to Hiroshima to apologise, the answer is no”, the official told The Washington Post.
Mr Kerry’s appearance, just footsteps away from Ground Zero, completed an evolution for the USA, whose leaders avoided the city for many years because of political sensitivities.
Speaking of the USA alliance with Japan, Kerry said, “My visit to Hiroshima has a very special meaning about the strength of the relationship and the journey we have traveled together since the hard time of the war”.
Kerry didn’t speak publicly at the ceremony, though could be seen with his arm around Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, a Hiroshima native, and whispering in his ear. They are most often discussed as a cautionary tale about the global dangers of nuclear weapons rather than a lesson on U.S.-Japan relations.
But Kerry said he’d try to get him to come.
It was the first consensus document on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation by both nuclear states and nonnuclear states since participants failed to issue a joint statement at last spring’s Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in Washington.
Advertisement
“Any suggestion by any candidate for high public office that we should be building more weapons and giving them to a country like Korea or Japan are absurd on their face and run counter to everything that every president, Republican or Democrat alike, has tried to achieve ever since World War II”, Kerry said.
