HIROSHIMA, Japan — Barack Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons on Friday as he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
Some 140,000 people were killed when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city on Aug. 6, 1945.
A helicopter and motorcade brought Obama to the Hiroshima Peace Park Memorial, where he spent a short time in the site’s museum and then solemnly placed a wreath at the arched monument.
Obama did not apologize for the U.S. actions and instead paid tribute to “all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war,” saying that “their souls speak to us” and “mere words cannot give voice to such suffering.”
The president evoked the horrors of the war to lay out his vision of a world without nuclear weapons.
“We have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again,” Obama said. “We are not bound by genetic code to repeat mistakes of the past — we can learn.”
“We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama wrote.
@Agency report.
