Hiroshima: Barack Obama makes history

US President Barack Obama hugs Shigeaki Mori, a survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, during a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. (Photo: AFP)

Barack Obama paid moving tribute to victims of the first atomic bomb Friday and called for a world free of nuclear weapons, during a historic and emotional visit to Hiroshima.

In a ceremony loaded with symbolism, the first sitting US President to visit the city met survivors of the fearsome attack that marked one of the final, terrifying chapters of World War II.

“Seventy-one years ago, death fell from the sky and the world was changed,” Mr Obama said of a bomb that “demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself”.

Mr Obama offered a floral wreath at the cenotaph.

Mr Obama spoke briefly with two survivors in the audience after his remarks Friday at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park: Sunao Tsuboi, the 91-year-old head of a survivors group, and Shigeaki Mori, 79.

“The President gestured as if he was going to give me a hug, so we hugged,” Mori told reporters afterwards. The trip comes over seven decades after the Enola Gay bomber dropped its deadly atomic payload, dubbed “Little Boy”, over Hiroshima.

As expected, Mr Obama offered no apology for the bombings, having insisted that he would not revisit decisions made by then President Harry Truman at the close of a brutal war.