Obama visits Hiroshima, pushes nuclear agenda

Associated Press

HIROSHIMA, Japan

With an unflinching look back at a painful history, President Barack Obama stood on the hallowed ground of Hiroshima on Friday and declared it a fitting place to summon people everywhere to embrace the vision of a world without nuclear weapons.

As the first American president to visit the city where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb, Obama came to acknowledge – but not apologize for – an act many Americans see as a justified end to a brutal war that Japan started with a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor.

Some 140,000 people died after a U.S. warplane targeted wartime Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and 70,000 more perished in Nagasaki, where a second bomb was dropped three days later. Japan soon surrendered.

“Their souls speak to us,” Obama said of the dead. “They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and who we might become.”

With a lofty speech and a warm embrace for an elderly survivor, Obama renewed the call for a nuclear-free future that he had first laid out in a 2009 speech in Prague.

This time, Obama spoke as a far more experienced president than the one who had employed his upbeat “Yes, we can” campaign slogan on the first go-round.

The president, who has made uneven progress on his nuclear agenda over the past seven years, spoke of “the courage to escape the logic of fear” as he held out hope for diligent, incremental steps to reduce nuclear stockpiles.

“We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe,” he said.

Obama spent less than two hours in Hiroshima but seemed to accomplish what he came for. It was a choreographed performance meant to close old wounds without inflaming new passions on a subject still fraught after all these years.

In a solemn ceremony on a sunwashed afternoon, Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe placed wreaths before the cenotaph, a simple arched stone monument at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. Only the clicking of camera shutters intruded on the moment as Obama closed his eyes and briefly bowed his head.

Then, after each leader gave a brief remark, Obama approached two aging survivors of the bombing who were seated in the front row, standing in for the thousands still seared by memories of that day.

Ninety-one-year-old Sunao Tsuboi, the head of a survivors group, energetically engaged the president in conversation, telling Obama he would be remembered as someone who listened to the voice of a few survivors. He urged him to come back and meet more.