Obama Visit to Hiroshima

Barack Obama has become the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, 71 years after the Japanese city became the target of the world’s first atomic bombing and ushered in a nuclear age he has vowed to bring to an end.

In a scene many survivors of the US bombing believed they would never live to see, Obama laid flowers at a memorial to the dead before paying tribute to the people of Hiroshima and calling on humanity to learn the lessons of the past to make war less likely.

“On a bright cloudless morning death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” he said, adding that humankind had shown it had the means to destroy itself.

“Why did we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead,” he said.

“Their souls speak to us, they ask us to look inward, take stock of who we are,” he said.

Obama urged the world to “choose a future when Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not considered the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”

He said: “Technological progress without equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of the atom requires a moral revolution as well.

“This is why we come to this place, we stand here, in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell.

“We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry.

“Someday the voices will no longer be with us to bear witness, but the memory must never fade. That memory fuels our imagination. It allows us to change.”

In the distance stood the burned-out shell of the atomic-bomb dome – the most potent physical symbol of Hiroshima’s recovery from the ashes of war.

As expected, Obama did not offer an apology for the decision by his predecessor, Harry Truman, to unleash an atomic bomb over the city. The attack at the end of the second world war on 6 August 1945 killed an estimated 80,000 people soon after the blast. By the end of the year, the death toll had reached 140,000.

After the ceremony, Obama talked to two survivors: Sunao Tsuboi, the 91-year-old head of a survivors group, and Shigeaki Mori, 79, a historian who was just 8 when the bomb detonated.

Obama spoke to Tsuboi first. They laughed at one point, the president throwing back his head and smiling broadly. Obama mostly listened, though, holding the elderly man’s hand in his own, an interpreter standing nearby. Tsuboi stamped his cane emphatically while speaking.

Obama then stepped to Mori and shook his hand. He bowed his head briefly and nodded as the man spoke. He patted Mori on the back and hugged him as the survivor shed a few tears.

He was accompanied by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, whose presence, Obama said ahead of the visit, would “highlight the extraordinary alliance” the US had created during the seven decades since the end of the war.

Obama had long held the desire to go to Hiroshima, despite the potential for the visit to cause controversy in the US. 

While many Japanese consider the attack a war crime – yet recognising the part their country’s militarist leaders played in bringing it about – the consensus in the US is that the attack hastened the end of the Pacific war, saving many more American and Japanese lives.