In the first visit from a sitting president since the USA deployed the first atomic bomb, President Obama called for an end to nuclear weapons, a symbolic and historic gesture that also doubled as a capstone of sorts to the president’s efforts to promote disarmaments and nonproliferation, goals he has had mixed success pursuing.
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“Death fell from the sky and the world was changed”, Obama said.
“The memory of the morning of August 6, 1945, must never fade”.
Otherwise, why would we need to “come to this place” to call for a “moral revolution” to coincide with the “scientific revolution that led to” the creation of the atomic bomb?
The visit has attracted attention from around the world, despite repeated statements from the U.S. side that President Obama would not apologize for the attack, which claimed an estimated 140,000 lives. “We come to mourn the dead”, Obama, who is the first sitting USA president to visit Hiroshima, said.
Obama will tour Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial and is expected to lay a wreath with Abe.
“It’s going to mean a lot for people here to see him come and lay flowers and pay his respects”.
President Barack Obama may have faced the legacy of Hiroshima most directly with his embrace of a man who survived the devastating atomic blast. Three days after the atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. About 80,000 were killed outright by the bombing in Hiroshima and another 60,000 died by the year’s end. Obama has bet our future on the notion that the Iranians will cast aside their religious fanaticism and, with it, the nuclear weapons that he has permitted them to have.
Although some 70% of Japanese people backed the visit to Hiroshima, it was not without controversy. He participatedbin his final G-7 Summit in Ise-Shima, Japan, before becoming the first US president to visit Hiroshima, the site of the world’s first atomic bombing.
Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. “Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons”.
The president did not apologise for the actions of his countrymen some 16 years before he was born but offered a carefully choreographed display reflecting on the horrors of war.
Obama signed a guest book: “We have known the agony of war”.
Mr Obama praised the US-Japan alliance as “one of the strongest in the world”, with his visit “a testament to how even the most painful divides can be bridged – how our two nations, former adversaries, cannot just become partners, but become the best of friends and the strongest of allies”.
Supporters said that was a missed opportunity.
“The suffering, such as illness, gets carried on over the generations – that is what I want President Obama to know”, she said.
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Critics believe Obama’s mere presence in Hiroshima would be viewed as an apology for what they see as a bombing that was needed to stop a Japanese war machine that had brutalized Asia and killed many Americans. Mori spent 35 years trying to locate and console family members of 12 captured American airmen who were killed in the bombing.
