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on the order of President Harry Truman, a B-29 named the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The blast destroyed the city, killed more than 100,000 people, and hastened the end of World War II.
On the 75th anniversary of the bombing, in the middle of his campaign for the White House, Joe Biden marked the moment, writing that the images of destruction in Hiroshima — and, three days later, in Nagasaki — „still horrify us.“
„They reach through history to remind us of the hideous damage nuclear weapons can inflict, and our collective responsibility to ensure that such weapons are never again used,“ Biden said.
Later this week, now-President Biden arrives in Hiroshima as a man who holds that responsibility in his hands.
Biden will visit the city for the G-7 summit, where he and other world leaders will focus on a range of issues, including Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, climate change, and the global economy.
But Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who represents Hiroshima in Japan’s legislature, has said he hopes the setting of the summit will bring a focus to the danger of nuclear weapons.
And in that setting, the leader of the country who carried out the bombing will inevitably play an outsized role in any events commemorating it. Obama visited Hiroshima in 2016
Former President Barack Obama was the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city, speaking at its Peace Memorial in 2016. Standing alongside then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Obama said that „death fell from the sky and the world was changed.“
Obama pointedly did not apologize for the U.S. decision to use atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but paid tribute to the people who died, and tried to put the threat of nuclear weapons in context. „Hiroshima teaches us this truth,“ Obama said. „Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.“
Jon Wolfsthal, who worked on nuclear proliferation in the Obama Administration, helped plan that trip. A year later, he found himself talking to a local official during a visit of his own to Hiroshima.
