On Friday, US President Barack Obama visited Hiroshima in Japan to honor the memory of the victims of the world’s first deployed atomic bomb.
Obama wrote in the Hiroshima Peace Park guest book, “We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.”
Obama added that scientific strides must be matched by moral progress or mankind is doomed.
Obama’s visit is particularly important as it is the first visit by a sitting US president to Hiroshima. The atom bomb dropped upon Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killed about 140,000 people. The dead also included 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, a second atomic bomb was dropped by the US on Nagasaki, killing a total of 80,000, including an additional 30,000 Koreans. Most of the people killed in both cities were civilians.
On Friday, hundreds of people lined the streets to welcome the US President as his motorcade entered the city. The presidential limousine pulled up behind the Peace Memorial Museum.
Obama laid a wreath in front of the cenotaph. He bowed his head and stood in silence for a minute. Japan’s Abe then did the same. “We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past,” Obama said. The souls of the people who died in this city “speak to us,” he further said.
“They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.”