History revisited: Barack Obama lays wreath at Hiroshima memorial

FP Staff • May 27, 2016, 17:12:59 IST

US President Barack Obama on Friday became the first American president to confront the historic and haunted ground of Hiroshima.

US President Barack Obama on Friday became the first American president to confront the historic and haunted ground of Hiroshima. Obama, third from right, walks off Marine One at the landing zone in Hiroshima on Friday. AP

Obama, center, is greeted upon arrival at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. Obama’s visit is a moment 70 years in the making. Other American presidents considered coming, but the politics were still too sensitive, the emotions too raw. Jimmy Carter visited as a former president in 1984. AP

“Hiroshima is much more than a reminder of the terrible toll in WW- II and the death of innocents across the continents,” Barack Obama said as he laid a wreath at Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima on Friday. AP

Barack Obama, second from left, greets Shigeaki Mori, an atomic bomb survivor, third from right, and Sunao Tsuboi, right, chairman of Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations at the event. AP

Barack Obama with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Technological progress without equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of the atom requires a moral revolution as well, Obama said. AP

Obama, left, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, second from right, greet Shigeaki Mori, second from left, created memorial for American WWII POWs killed at Hiroshima, and Sunao Tsuboi, chairman of Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, each other during the event. AP

In the museum’s guest book, the president wrote that he hoped the world will “find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.” AP