Meanwhile, a group representing American former prisoners of war under Japan says the White House has invited one of them to accompany President Barack Obama on his historic visit to Hiroshima this week. With more than 15,000 of these weapons still in existence today and with ever-progressing tensions and risks of nuclear warfare, it is time we address this security issue head on. Mr Obama will become the first sitting US President to visit Hiroshima, where the first atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, killing about 1,40,000 people in total.
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Accompanying Obama during his Hiroshima tour will be Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose administration asserts that future generations should not have to apologize for the actions of their forebears. While a presidential visit to Hiroshima serves for the Japanese as a painful reminder of their wartime past of suffering, as a victim of a powerful new weapon, some Asian nations that were invaded and brutalized by Japan during the war might misconstrue the visit as America’s acquiescence of Japan’s victimhood while ignoring the greater suffering Japan inflicted on other nations.
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 partly due to his leanings towards nuclear non-proliferation.
“I think it is also a happy story about how former adversaries came together to become one of the closest partnerships and closest allies in the world.”
In that widely lauded address, Obama’s first major policy speech as president, he vowed to take concrete steps toward riding the globe of nuclear arms. In doing that, Obama should say nothing that could be interpreted as an apology.
“I think that it’s important to recognize that in the midst of war, leaders make all kinds of decisions”.
With polls showing a major disparity between Japanese and US opinions regarding the justification of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, Smith said President Obama will avoid an apology and seek to highlight the need for nuclear disarmament around the world. “It’s the job of historians to ask questions and examine them”, he said. The United States President also said in his last few months of his presidency, he plans on reflecting on “the nature of war”, according to a report done by Reuters.
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President Harry Truman twice asked Japan to surrender.
