HIROSHIMA, Japan — Nearly 71 years after an American bomber passed high above this Japanese city on a clear August morning on a mission that would alter history, President Obama on Friday made a a solemn visit to Hiroshima to offer respects to the victims of the world’s first deployed atomic bomb.
In the Hiroshima Peace Park guest book, Obama wrote:
“We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.” In later remarks, he said that scientific strides must be matched by moral progress or mankind was doomed.
Obama’s visit, the first to Hiroshima by a sitting U.S. president, had stirred great anticipation here and across Japan among those who longed for an American leader 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.
Three days after the Hiroshima bombing in 1945, a second U.S. atomic bomb hit Nagasaki, killing a total of 80,000, including another 30,000 Koreans. Most of those killed in both cities were civilians. The Japanese emperor announced his nation’s surrender a week later.
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