Earlier this month, I reported about President Barack Obama’s visit to Hiroshima during his trip to Asia this week. He is the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima since World War II.
Seventy-one years ago, we dropped nuclear weapons on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Obama gave a speech in Hiroshima calling for the end of nuclear weapons.
He wrote in the Hiroshima Peace Park guestbook, according to the Independent via Liberal America, calling for:
“…A world without nuclear weapons.”
People lined the streets as President Obama’s motorcade came through the city. His limousine pulled up behind the Peace Memorial museum.
The guests gathered in front of the curved, concrete cenotaph memorial which pays tribute to those who were lost. The memorial has an eternal flame near it. The president laid a wreath near the flame.
According to the president via the Washington Post,
“‘We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past.’ Obama said. ‘The souls of the people who died in this city ‘speak to us,’ he added. ‘They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.”
He asked for other nations in the world to stop producing and eventually eliminate them.
President Obama added:
“The world was forever changed here … But today, the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is the future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not for the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.”
Obama met with a survivor of the blast. Shigeaki Mori was only 8-years-old when the bomb went off on August 6, 1945.
He was walking to school when the bomb hit. It knocked him off of a bridge and into a river. He actually was lucky. The water protected him from the firestorm that followed.
Mr. Mori met and embraced President Obama:
Featured Image Screenshot Of Wall Street Journal Video Via YouTube.
