Obama WILL visit Hiroshima and become first sitting U.S. president to set foot in town since WWII atomic bombing

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[h=1]Obama WILL visit Hiroshima and become first sitting U.S. president to set foot in town since WWII atomic bombing[/h]

• President will make a side-trip during the G7 summit later this month in Japan
• On May 27 Obama will stop at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and 'share his reflections on the significance of the site and the events that occurred there'
• White House said today: 'He will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. Instead, he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future'
• The visit to Hiroshima fits with Obama's nuclear non-proliferation agenda

By FRANCESCA CHAMBERS, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 14:10, 10 May 2016 | UPDATED: 15:04, 10 May 2016

 

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President Barack Obama will this month become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since the U.S. dropped a war-ending atomic bomb on the Japanese city in 1945.
The White House announced the visit this morning, confirming suspicions that Obama, who has made nuclear non-proliferation a pillar of his foreign policy, would make a side-trip during the G7 summit later this month in Japan.
'We believe that this is the appropriate moment for the President to visit this city and shrine,' the president's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, said this morning in a post on Medium.
Obama will on May 27 will make a stop at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and 'share his reflections on the significance of the site and the events that occurred there,' Rhodes wrote.

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President Barack Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city in 1945

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The devastation of the bombing on Hiroshima was recorded from above

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Hiroshima is a southern Japanese city, chosen for the A-bomb because of its size and because it hadn't been bombed in World War II at all – making the impact of the atomic explosion easy to determine

 

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'He will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. Instead, he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future.'




Secretary of State John Kerry said during an April visit that 'everyone' - and that includes the president - should visit the historic site and he would lobby Obama to take his turn.
Kerry became the highest ranking U.S. official to acknowledge the tragedy when he and his foreign counterparts participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the bomb memorial last month during a G7 function.
'What I got here was a firsthand sense of what happened in Hiroshima and what happens with a nuclear weapon, particularly in terms of its types of destruction,' Kerry said at a news conference after.
Kerry pointedly said, 'Everyone should visit Hiroshima, and "everyone" means everyone.'
'So I hope one day, the President of the United States will be among the everyone who is able to come here.'
The president's spokesman, Josh Earnest, had said outright during discussions of a possible visit that Obama would not apologize for the United States' use of the A-bomb during WWII.
Previewing today's decision, he also said 'symbolically' there's probably 'no more powerful illustration of that commitment than the city that contained the victims of the first use of that weapon.'
The U.S. deployed two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima, on August 6, and Nagasaki, on August 9, in 1945 as it sought to put an end to the global war. The bombs killed at least 129,000 people.
They were the first and only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history.

 

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[h=3]THE BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA[/h]Hiroshima became the first city in history to be targeted by a nuclear weapon when the U.S. Army dropped an atomic bomb on it on the morning of August 6, 1945.
The bomb, containing a destructive power never before witnessed, directly killed an estimated 80,000 people, while some 160,000 – almost half the city's population – are thought to have died due to injury and radiation.
Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, causing a similar number of deaths. The massive scale of destruction and killing led to Japan's surrender.
The two bombings remain the only instances of nuclear weapons targeting cities during warfare.
While some have called for the U.S. to apologize, many believe the bombings were justified and helped avoid thousands of deaths by speeding up the end of the war.

 

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The U.S. military gauged the damage from the Hiroshima bomb through aerial photographs like this one, which showed military and industrial installations with percentages of total destruction

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The aftermath of America's World War II-era attack were captured by a U.S. Navy photographer who went into the hot zone to document the ruins



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Kerry (at center) laid a wreath at the Memorial Cenotaph for the 1945 atomic bombing victims in the Peace Memorial Park, on the sidelines of the G7 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Hiroshima on April 11

Obama has pursued an agenda as president that would stop the spread of nuclear capabilities beyond the nine nations known to have them – Russia, the UK, France, Germany, China, India and Pakistan. Israel is also believed to have nuclear warheads in its posession.
A nuclear-free world continues to be a 'long-term goal' of the president's, Earnest said last month as the topic of Hiroshima came up, and that's why he began hosting his annual nuclear summit.
'That goal is unlikely to be achieved during his lifetime but there certainly is progress that we can make in pursuit of that goal,' the White House official said.
The Obama administration, in conjunction with four other countries, doggedly engaged in talks with Iran that ultimately ended in a deal with the Middle Eastern country that Obama and foreign governments involved in the accord say will cripple Tehran's nuclear program.


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Critics within the US, including many Republicans in Congress, are wary of the agreement, however, and are convinced that Kerry, acting as the United States' lead negotiator, did not oversee the best bargain.
The White House said today that in visiting Hiroshima, Obama would 'shine a spotlight on the tremendous and devastating human toll of war.'
'To be sure, the United States will be eternally proud of our civilian leaders and the men and women of our armed forces who served in World War II for their sacrifice at a time of maximum peril to our country and our world. Their cause was just, and we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude, which the President will again commemorate shortly after the visit on Memorial Day,' Rhodes said in the Medium post.
He said, 'This visit will offer an opportunity to honor the memory of all innocents who were lost during the war.'


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[h=1]Japanese may see Obama's Hiroshima visit as an apology anyway.[/h]

Obama's Latest "APOLOGY" FOR AMERICA.