U.S. President Barack Obama mentioned Korean victims of the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan as he made a landmark visit to Hiroshima for the first time as a sitting American president since the bombings.
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While the president was in Japan, he laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. We come to ponder a bad force unleashed in a not-so-distant past, ‘ he said at the memorial. The bombing, Obama said, “demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself”.
Abe is speaking at a wreath-laying with Obama in the city where the US dropped the first atomic bomb. “Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons”, Obama wrote.
President Obama’s speech did not include an apology, but he did exchange handshakes and an embrace with atom bomb survivors in Hiroshima.
Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton says President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, Japan, is the latest stop on his “shameful apology tour”. About 70,000 people were killed three days later when the USA dropped another atomic bomb called “Fat Man” on the coastal city of Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending a war that had killed millions.
The president is accompanied on his visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – a demonstration of the friendship that exists between the only nation ever to use an atomic bomb and the only nation ever to have suffered from one.
Obama spoke briefly with survivors who were in the audience for his remarks at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
Obama hoped Hiroshima would someday be remembered not as the dawn of the atomic age but as the beginning of a “moral awakening”. Please!” “It’s scary. We want President Obama to visit the Atomic Dome. He also called for a “world without nuclear weapons”.
“It’s not only a reminder of the awful toll of World War II and the death of innocents across continents but it’s also to remind ourselves that the job’s not done”, he said Thursday.
Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons during his visit. He said it would help the suffering of survivors and he echoed the anti-nuclear sentiments.
Abe commented at the conclusion of a summit of world leaders in Shima, Japan.
“Japan has to apologize for Pearl Harbor, too, if we’re going to say the USA must apologize …”
Mr Obama stepped over to meet historian Shigeaki Mori.
Before visiting the memorial Obama met with US servicemen and their families at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Hiroshima. In America, the dominant view holds that the nuclear attacks that killed more than 200,000 were necessary to quickly end the war and save a greater number of American – and Japanese – lives that otherwise would have been lost.
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Obama entered the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where he was expected to sign a guest book. “We come to mourn the dead”, he said.
