Obama Calls for World Without Nuclear Weapons at Site of Hiroshima Bombing

“Even if Obama visits the damaged city, he can not hide his identity as a nuclear war fanatic and nuclear weapons proliferator”, the North Korean news agency said, adding that, “Obama is seized with the wild ambition to dominate the world by dint of the USA nuclear edge”.

Barack Obama on Friday became the first incumbent US president to visit Hiroshima since America dropped an atomic bomb on the city 71 years ago, stirring mixed feelings among the United States, Japan and the victim countries during WWII. “Death fell from the sky and the world was changed”, Obama said. He said that the bombing demonstrated the fact that mankind poses the means to destroy itself.

Many in the United States believe the use of the nuclear bomb, though devastating, was right, because it forced Japan to surrender, bringing an end to World War Two.

“We come to ponder the awful force unleashed in the not so distant past”, the president went on to say.

“We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner”.

Obama then went on to give an emotional hug to Mori, a survivor who worked to gain official recognition of 12 Americans killed in the atomic bombing. U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, also joined the president.

Hiroshima University student Morita Hirotaka said during an interview with Xinhua that with the end of his last president term in office approaching, Obama hoped to leave behind some political legacy.

The Japanese peace park does not define the “error” in question, whether it refers to the USA bombings or the Japanese aggression and Second World War that preceded them; stubborn questions that are still answered differently in each country.

During his historic visit to Hiroshima on Friday, Obama paid tribute to the victims of the bomb and urged nations to put an end to nuclear weapons stockpiling. Captain Robert Lewis, the co-pilot, said: “My God, what have we done?” after the bomb dropped, according to news accounts.

There are American former POWs who want the president to fault Japan for starting the war in the Pacific. Obama wanted to strengthen his anti-nuclear agenda from his Hiroshima visit that would make the world more safe from the nuclear terror.

Mr Obama, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 on the back of his promotion of nuclear non-proliferation, used a speech at the memorial site to reaffirm his commitment to reducing global stockpiles of nuclear weapons. “One of them that he did not list was self-defense, which was why we were in World War II to begin with”.

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A second nuclear bomb destroyed the city of Nagasaki three days later, killing another 70,000 people.