Obama Renews Call to Scrap Nuclear Weapons in Historic Hiroshima Visit
by
Wcbm
President Barack Obama called on nations to “escape the logic of fear” and reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons as he became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Hiroshima, Japan Friday.
Obama did not apologize for or second-guess President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, accelerating the end of World War II.
But speaking in the place where the nuclear age began, Obama said the memory of the 140,000 people killed on Aug. 6, 1945, “must never fade … We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell … we listen to a silent cry.”
“Death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” Obama said, adding that the destruction of Hiroshima “demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”
