Should Obama go to Hiroshima?

Obama should visit Ground Zero — but without apologies

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference at the conclusion of the G7 foreign ministers meetings in Hiroshima, Japan, on April 11. (Jonathan Ernst/Pool photo via Associated Press)

Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry did something that no predecessor had ventured to do. He attended a memorial service in Hiroshima and toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial museum, which commemorates the devastation wrought by the bomb Little Boy in 1945.

And now the question arises: Should President Obama follow Kerry and visit Hiroshima next month, crowning his final year with what The Washington Post calls a "grand symbolic gesture" in support of his goal of a world without nuclear weapons? He will be attending a Group of Seven Summit in Japan anyway, and White House aides are reportedly exploring the possibility of Obama giving a speech near the site of ground zero.

Such a visit could indeed be justified — so long as it were cast solely in terms of non-proliferation and not suffused with regret for the U.S. action. Kerry showed how to handle this balancing act. His statement in the museum guest book was a tribute to the moving nature of the memorial and worldwide yearning not only "to end the threat of nuclear weapons, but to rededicate all our effort to avoid war itself."

Kerry's actions in no way constituted an apology, and Obama would have to make it equally clear that his visit was not about issuing mea culpas. President Harry Truman ordered bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an attempt to end a war that had consumed millions of lives and threatened to kill many hundreds of thousands more — at the very least — including many Americans.The battle for Okinawa in 1945 had been a bloodbath, with tens of thousands of Allied casualties and more than 77,000 Japanese soldiers dead. And the civilian toll was enormous, too.

U.S. military planners were preparing for an invasion that year of Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island, a challenge much more formidable than Okinawa — and after that the main island of Honshu. Staggering casualties were anticipated on both sides.

Indeed, saturation bombing of the Japanese mainland before Hiroshima had already killed hundreds of thousands, including 80,000 in Tokyo by firebomb raids in March alone. That city had been reduced to rubble. And such bombing would have continued absent a Japanese surrender.

And yet surrender did not appear imminent in the summer of '45. Even after the bomb over Nagasaki wrecked that city, the Japanese government split over whether to surrender. Only the unprecedented intervention of the emperor tipped the scales toward peace.

The Hiroshima bomb looms large in public consciousness in part because it represents the first use of a kind of weapon that has become so powerful that its general use could destroy civilization. And while eliminating nuclear weapons may be a long way off, that goal — and the goal of keeping them away from dangerous regimes and terrorists — is one worth promoting, even at such a sensitive site.