In Hiroshima 71 years after first atomic strike, Obama calls for end of nuclear weapons

Nearly 71 years after an American bomber passed high above this Japanese city on a clear August morning for a mission that would alter history, President Obama on Friday called for an end to nuclear weapons in a solemn visit to Hiroshima to offer respects to the victims of the world’s first deployed atomic bomb.

Writing in the Hiroshima Peace Park guest book, Obama called for the courage to “spread peace and pursue a world without nuclear weapons.” In later remarks, he said that scientific strides must be matched by moral progress or mankind was doomed.

Obama’s visit, the first to Hiroshima by a sitting U.S. president, had stirred great anticipation here and across Japan among those who longed for an American leader to acknowledge the suffering of the estimated 140,000 killed during the bombing on Aug. 6, 1945, and its aftermath. That figure includes 20,000 Koreans who had been forced by the Japanese military to work in the city for the imperial war machine.