HIROSHIMA (SW): Nearly 71 years after the US dropping nuclear bomb on Hiroshima in Japan, President Obama called for an end to nuclear weapons in a solemn visit here to offer respects to the victims of the world’s first deployed atomic bomb.
Obama became the first US President to have visited the site since the bombing that coincided with the end of the World War II in 1945.
“We come to remember the terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past,” Obama said addressing at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, adding that the souls of the people who died in this city “speak to us and they ask us to look inward and take stock of how we are and what we might become.” The president called for nations to reconsider the development of nuclear weapons and to roll back and “ultimately eliminate” them.
As the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, Obama’s visit freighted with symbolism for the two nations that have transformed from bitter World War II enemies into the closest of allies, the Washington Post reported.
Obama’s visit had been eyed with great anticipation in Hiroshima, and across Japan, among ordinary residents who had longed for an American president to acknowledge the suffering of the estimated 140,000 killed during the bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and its aftermath. That figure includes 20,000 Koreans who had been forced by the Japanese military to work in the city for the imperial war machine.
Previous U.S. presidents had avoided Hiroshima over fears that a visit would be regarded as an apology for President Harry Truman’s decision to authorize the bombings. But Obama and his advisers believed the time was right, in his final year in office, to make the pilgrimage — not as an apology but rather to highlight the alliance between the two nations and to warn of the dangers of modern nuclear weapons, exponentially more powerful than the bombs dropped in Japan.
ENDS
