politico:

Obama visits Hiroshima

Excerpts from President Barack Obama’s Hiroshima visit on Friday.

politico:

Americans have not always relished scrutiny of the atomic blast that decimated Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. No sitting president has ever visited the city, and in 1996, the United States and China rejected a Japanese proposal that Hiroshima become a World Heritage site. But on Friday, Barack Obama’s motorcade will pull up to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, and the world will pause for a few moments to contemplate what happened here.

It’s one of the most dramatic stages a president could speak from, and obviously compelling to a president who relishes a challenge. Obama has made many thrusts at the history book in his final year, but this one presents unique traps. No president wants to apologize for the decision to drop the bomb—a decision that likely hastened the end of the war. Yet the sickening story of what actually happened here, the 100,000 civilians killed, doesn’t fit the roseate glow of American history, and demands a kind of reckoning. And this year it comes with its own domestic challenge: an America First faction, awakened by Donald Trump, that must be almost salivating at the prospect that a Democratic president would become the first to express a form of apology for a decisive American act.

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What Obama Will See When He Goes to Hiroshima

Today, the White House announced that later this month, Barack Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, Japan. Coming nearly 71 years after U.S. forces detonated an atomic bomb over the city in the closing weeks of World War II, Obama’s trip is part of an ambitious final-year international agenda for the president. The White House has debated a visit to the rebuilt, bustling Japanese city for months, as the president has struggled to balance his aspirations for a nuclear-free world with ambivalence about apologizing for America’s use of the bomb, which is estimated to have killed more than 100,000 Japanese civilians. Here’s some of what Obama will likely see when he visits the historic city. More photos here