The Slatest

Obama Meets, Hugs Hiroshima Survivors After Speech at Memorial Site

President Obama and atomic bomb survivor Shigeaki Mori at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Friday.

Atsushi Tomura/Getty Images

President Obama on Friday became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, Japan, laying a memorial wreath, delivering a 20-minute speech, and meeting survivors of the Aug. 6, 1945, attack.

As expected, the president denounced the use and amassment of nuclear weapons but did not apologize for or attempt to justify the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

From the New York Times:

In an emotional moment after his speech, Mr. Obama embraced and shook hands with survivors of the attack, which ushered in the nuclear age and exposed humanity to risks the president believes the world must do far more to resolve. The first of those survivors, Sunao Tsuboi, a chairman of the Hiroshima branch of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, gripped Mr. Obama’s hand and would not let go until he had spoken to him for some time.

Video:

Said Tsuboi: “I held his hand, and we didn’t need an interpreter. I could understand what he wanted to say by his expression.”

(For a more skeptical view of the president’s attitudes toward modern weaponry, here’s Slate’s William Saletan writing in 2012 about how drone targets are selected.)