President Barack Obama visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan Friday, where he commemorated the over 100,000 lives lost from the U.S. atomic bombing of Japanese cities and called for nuclear stockpile reductions and the securing of nuclear weapons.
Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site where on Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb, visited the memorial after a summit of the Group of Seven nations. Although he did not address whether the U.S. was correct in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War 2, he highlighted a need for further nuclear stockpile reductions.
“We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves,” Obama said. “But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.”
“We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics,” he said.
Warning of the destructive potential of technological advances, he added, “Hiroshima teaches this truth: technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”
He noted that the U.S. and Japan have forged a strong alliance over the years “that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war.”
