Biden pays silent tribute to Hiroshima bomb victims
President Biden was 2 years old when the nuclear age began with an explosion of devastation the likes of which the world had never seen. Seventy-eight years later, he came to ground zero on Friday 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, visited a museum, laid wreaths at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and planted a tree. The president stared solemnly at the Cenotaph for the victims of the atomic bomb as the city’s mayor described the memorial. But the president made no comment on what he saw, let alone the apologies some Japanese still wish the United States would give.
Mr Biden’s visit came at a pivotal time in the nuclear age, with the “prospect of Armageddon,” as he has described it, greater than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin has hinted ominously that he may yet unleash nuclear weapons to save his flailing invasion of Ukraine. And instead of moving away from the kind of destruction represented by Hiroshima, the world is seeing more such weapons being built and fewer restrictions placed on their proliferation.
“I am very concerned that we are going in the wrong direction, that we are less safe, and I am afraid that we will see nuclear weapons used in our lifetime,” said Jon B. Wolfsthal, a former arms control adviser to President Barack Obama and now a senior advisor to Global Zero, a group that advocates for the abolition of nuclear weapons. “So to me, the importance of going to Hiroshima is not just about the symbolism, but about using the legacy of Hiroshima to remind people that these weapons are devastating and should never be used again.”
The visit to the Hiroshima Memorial served as a symbolic opener for this year’s summit meeting of the Group of 7 of major industrial democracies, where the war in Ukraine will be a major talking point. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, who is hosting the meeting and representing Hiroshima in parliament, hoped to draw attention to efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons
“Through their visit to the Peace Memorial Park, G7 leaders have deepened their understanding of the reality of the atomic bombings and united their hearts to comfort the souls of lost lives,” Japan’s foreign ministry said in a statement. “The G7 leaders reiterated their position that threats by Russia to use nuclear weapons, let alone their use, are intolerable.”
But there seemed to be no major new initiatives in the works to achieve that goal; in any case, nuclear proliferation has only escalated in recent years. Russia recently suspended its last major nuclear arms control treaty with the United States, the New START Agreement, which limited nuclear warheads and delivery systems. North Korea has expanded its own nuclear arsenal as diplomatic efforts to persuade the country to reverse course have failed. Mr Biden’s attempt to revive Mr Obama’s pact with Iran, designed to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, has all but failed. And the Pentagon is warning that China could more than double its nuclear arsenal to 1,000 warheads by 2030.
America’s mission to counter the proliferation of nuclear weapons has always been complicated by its own history of introducing them into modern warfare. “The United States is the only country in the world to have used nuclear weapons twice, destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and set a precedent,” Putin said last fall when he annexed eastern parts of Ukraine.
In Japanese-American relations, too, the issue has always been delicate. Mr Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, in 2016, but he refused to apologize for the bombings, which could have sparked criticism from Americans at home, citing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that left the United States in brought the Second World War. .
Instead, Mr. Obama, who made global nuclear disarmament a long-term goal, used his visit to outline his vision for “a future where Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the beginning of nuclear war, but as the beginning of our own moral awakening” – an idea that seems even further from reality seven years later.
A B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb, named Little Boy, on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The blast generated heat nearly 14,000 degrees Fahrenheit by one calculation and destroyed or damaged 60,000 of the city’s 90,000 buildings; an estimated 140,000 people died, most of them civilians. A second bomb fell on Nagasaki three days later. Within a week, Japan had announced its surrender, ending the deadliest war in human history.
Since then, a debate has raged over President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use the newly developed weapon without a more explicit warning or demonstration, a decision justified as the best way to force the military-dominated leadership in Tokyo to without forcing the United States to begin a bloody amphibious invasion of the home islands.
Hiroshima has long since been rebuilt into a vibrant city of 1.2 million people and a manufacturing center known for heavy industries such as automobile, steel and shipbuilding. Bustling shopping districts and lush, tree-filled parkland leave little sense of death’s legacy. The passage of time has left less hibakusha, as the survivors are called.
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said how that legacy translates into reducing the risk of another Hiroshima “will be the most important legacy of this G7 summit,” but requires active presidential involvement.
“Preventing arms races, proliferation and nuclear war is a global effort,” said Mr. Kimball. “But history shows there is no substitute for US leadership in nuclear threat reduction, and there is no better time than now for President Biden to outline his plan to revamp nuclear risk reduction and disarmament diplomacy to help us bring back from the brink.”