President Obama’s no-apologies visit to Hiroshima at the end of the month is stoking critics of his nuclear disarmament record who say the visit will only draw attention to one of the biggest unfulfilled promises of his presidency.
Obama will become the first sitting president to visit one of two Japanese cities where President Harry Truman dropped the atomic bomb in 1945 at the end of WWII, which killed nearly 200,000 people, mostly civilians.
President Jimmy Carter visited Hiroshima, but only three years after he left office, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt paid her respects there in 1953, lamenting the mass suffering the Japanese experienced.
Just last month, Secretary of State John Kerry made the pilgrimage. But Obama’s decision to go carries with it the magnitude of a presidential visit, and the White House is walking a narrow line when it comes to how the visit is interpreted.
Instead of an apology tour, the White House said there will be no apology, and that the visit to Hiroshima will instead serve as a bookend to his major address in Prague in 2009 in which he called for a nuclear-free world.
But trying to pull off a non-apology presidential tour to Hiroshima will likely please no one and only give critics across the political spectrum new ammunition. Critics on the right are already labeling the Hiroshima visit a continuation of the apology tours the president began when he first took office.
Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin tweeted a previous column about Kerry’s “apology tour” of Hiroshima the same day the White House announced the trip, and conservative radio host Mike Gallagher tweeted that he is bracing for another apology for America.
In announcing the visit, White House spokesman Josh Earnest stressed that Obama won’t go there to apologize, but instead provide a “forward-looking signal about his ambition for realizing the goal of a planet without nuclear weapons.”
Whether the United States owes Japan an apology is a question “for historians” to ponder, he said.
That response has many critics on the left dumbfounded. Disarmament activists are already disappointed that Obama has continued to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and they argue that the visit will ring hollow if the president fails to apologize for the nearly 70 years of emotional scars the bombing wrought.
Peter Kuznick, the director of American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute and a strong proponent of disarmament, said a visit to Hiroshima gives Obama a chance to focus international attention on the biggest threat to human survival.
But if he goes and doesn’t announce that he is taking concrete steps to draw back the U.S. nuclear arsenal, then “I think this is simply an exercise in hypocrisy,” he said.
The lofty goal Obama set in Prague has been largely overrun by world events, most notably Russian intransigence and the rise of a vicious brand of terrorism and the fear that the Islamic State could attain enough nuclear material to make a dirty bomb and detonate it in a major western city.
North Korea, meanwhile, continues to move closer to building a nuclear weapon and taunts the United States, while Russian officials openly talk about unilateral strikes on the U.S. and Europe and decided to sit out the Washington nuclear summit this year. Pakistan also continues feverishly building its arsenal while rebuffing Western attempts to slow it down.
Just last month, the president acknowledged he had fallen far short, but said it wasn’t for lack of trying. He largely blamed Russia for violating nuclear treaties and renewed his call for Moscow and Washington to renew negotiations.
“I said in Prague that achieving the security and peace of a world without nuclear weapons will not happen quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” he said. “But we have begun.”
That’s not nearly enough, argues Kevin Martin, the president of Peace Action. The president should announce concrete action in Hiroshima or risk losing all credibility on the issue, he said.
Martin offers plenty of options. The president, he said, could reduce the number of nuclear warheads in reserve, remove nuclear weapons from “hair-trigger alert” status and cancel the Long Range Stand Off nuclear cruise missile or other parts of the $1 trillion the U.S. plans to spend over the next 30 years to overhaul nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
“At this point, it’s not enough to repeat the words Obama has said several times since his historic Prague speech calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons,” Martin said. “Obama must announce actions he will take in his remaining months as president that will actually bring the world closer to being free of nuclear weapons.”
