The president joined other leaders in laying wreaths at a memorial to the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon, amid growing fears that one could be used again.
President Biden was 2 years old when the nuclear era opened with a blast of devastation unlike any the world had ever seen. Seventy-eight years later, he came on Friday to ground zero of the first atomic bomb used in warfare to pay tribute to the dead.
Mr. Biden and other world leaders met privately with a survivor, toured a museum, laid wreaths at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and planted a tree. The president stared solemnly at the Cenotaph for the Atomic Bomb Victims as the city’s mayor described the monument. But the president offered no comments on what he saw, much less the apology some Japanese still wish the United States would provide.
Mr. Biden’s visit came at a pivotal moment in the atomic age, with the “prospect of Armageddon,” as he has described it, greater than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has hinted ominously that he may yet unleash nuclear weapons to salvage his flailing invasion of Ukraine. And rather than moving away from the kind of destruction represented by Hiroshima, the world is seeing more such arms being built and fewer constraints being imposed on their spread.
“I worry a lot that we are moving in the wrong direction, that we are less secure, and I worry we will see nuclear weapons used in our lifetimes,” said Jon B. Wolfsthal, a former arms control adviser to President Barack Obama and now a senior adviser to Global Zero, a group that advocates abolishing nuclear weapons. “So to me, the importance of going to Hiroshima is not just about the symbolism, but also using the legacy of Hiroshima to remind people that these weapons are devastating and should never again be used.”
The visit to the Hiroshima memorial served as a symbolic opener to this year’s Group of 7 summit meeting of major industrial democracies, where the war in Ukraine will be a major topic of discussion.
