Barack Obama 1st US President to visit Hiroshima

Barack Obama will become the first sitting US President to visit atomic bomb-struck Hiroshima during a trip to Japan later this month, the White House said on Tuesday.

Mr Obama, accompanied by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will make the deeply symbolic visit on May 27, after attending the G7 summit in southern Japan, said spokesperson Josh Earnest.

The White House described the trip as an effort to highlight the US “commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Mr Obama will visit the once ruined city’s Peace Memorial Park “where he will share his reflections on the significance of the site and the events that occurred there,” said US President’s senior foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes. The announcement comes after months of speculation in the US and Japan that the President, a Nobel peace laureate, would visit the city devastated in the final days of World War II.

On August 6, 1945, the US dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing around 140,000 people including those who survived the explosion itself but died later.