Obama Will Be First U.S. President to Visit Hiroshima

The White House announced Tuesday morning that President Obama will visit Hiroshima, Japan, later this month during his trip to Asia for the G7 Summit. He will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city, which was devastated by a U.S. nuclear bomb at the end of World War II. As many as 146,000 people were killed by the bomb blast in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and 80,000 more three days later in Nagasaki.

What will the president do there? He may lay a wreath at Peace Memorial Park. Peace groups hope he will meet with survivors of the atomic bomb to hear their stories and strengthen his commitment to nuclear disarmament. Now 71 years after the bombings, there are fewer and fewer survivors left.

What Obama won’t do is apologize, says White House advisor Benjamin Rhodes. Many believe that the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to end World War II and save American lives. Despite the massive devastation caused by the use of nuclear weapons, apologizing for it would be a deeply unpopular move, especially among conservatives.

For this reason, every U.S. president has avoided making this visit. Though Obama has reportedly been thinking about going to Hiroshima for a long time, only now, on his tenth trip to Asia, in his last year in office, has he finally decided to go.

Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the city. When asked whether he thought President Obama should visit Hiroshima, Kerry replied, “Everyone should visit Hiroshima.”

The president’s visit there will not only have an impact in the U.S., but also in Japan, explains James Schoff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It could underwhelm expectations if the [Japanese] public is -- even if the government is not -- expecting an apology,“ Schoff said. “There could be a backlash that could weaken, rather than strengthen, U.S.-Japan relations.”

Three months after Obama’s inauguration in 2009, he made a high-profile speech in which he stated "clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Later that year, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the strength of that commitment alone.

Despite those lofty goals, Obama’s legacy on nuclear non-proliferation is mixed.

His two biggest accomplishments were the negotiation of a new arms reduction treaty with Russia and the historic deal to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But the United States still has 1,550 nuclear warheads, some of which are on hair-trigger alert, meaning they can be launched in as few as 10 minutes.

What’s more, the U.S. has plans for a 30-year, $1 trillion modernization of the U.S. nuclear force – a plan Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action, calls a “train wreck” that “destroys U.S. credibility on non-proliferation.” On the other hand, the overhaul will help Obama deliver on his pledge that as long as the U.S. has nuclear weapons, they’ll be kept secure.

So if he’s not going to apologize, what will Obama do? Martin suggests that instead of apologizing for the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 – which he says would be “pointless, and nobody is asking him to do so” – Obama should announce concrete plans to use his remaining months in office to “actually bring the world closer to being free of nuclear weapons.” First and foremost: canceling that trillion-dollar plan to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Sharon Squassoni, who directs the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, doesn’t expect anything so concrete to come out of the visit. She says a major announcement for a new non-proliferation initiative is “a tall order for a side trip during the G7 Summit.”

“I think it’s a photo op,” she said in an interview. “It’s a nice bookend to his speeches in Prague and Berlin [in which he envisioned a world without nuclear weapons]. He’s not going to get Russia to do more arms control with the U.S. He’s not going to get Japan to give up all of its surplus plutonium.”

“But it’ll be a historic visit,” she went on. “And it totally fits with his interest and concern about these issues, which he’s shown since his days in the Senate.”

Photo: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy look out over the Ota River and city of Hiroshima, Japan, from atop the Hiroshima Castle on April 11, 2016. Photo from the White House via Medium.