Obama is going to Hiroshima not because of the place’s tragic past, but to use it as a warning for future. It's hard to get world attention when threat of nuclear war is low
Today's Hiroshima doesn't give the TV journalists a lot to work with. It's a raucous, bustling, mid-sized Japanese city with only few reminders of its destruction by atomic bomb in 1945. There's the skeletal dome of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (which was right under the blast), and discreet plaques on various other buildings saying that such-and-such a middle school, with 600 students, used to be on this site, and that's all.
So it's no wonder, with US President Barack Obama's scheduled visit to Hiroshima this week (but no apology), that practically every journalist, writing about the visit resorts to quoting from Paul Fussell's famous article in the New Republic in August, 1981: “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb”.
In 1945 Fussell had been a 20-year old infantry second lieutenant getting ready to invade Japan. He had already been through almost a year of combat in France and Germany, and he was one of the few original soldiers left in the 45th Infantry Division. The rest had been killed or wounded.
Fussell had reached the point — all soldiers who see real combat reach in the end — where he knew that he too would be killed if his Division was committed to combat again. But having survived the war in Europe, he was going to be sent to the Pacific, and the 45th Division would be in the first wave of landings on the main Japanese island of Honshu in March 1946.
like his few surviving comrades from the European war, he absolutely knew that he would die in Japan. So when they heard about the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender, they were crying with relief even as they cheered.
There's a different way of looking at the Hiroshima bomb. It's often mentioned by thehibakusha (bomb survivors) who struggle to give meaning to the horrors they experienced. If not for those bombs on living cities, they argue, the world would not have been afraid enough of these new weapons to avoid a nuclear war all down the long years of the Cold War.
I suspect Obama sees the logic of that, and that he is going to Hiroshima not because it is a symbol of the past, but rather to use it as a warning for the future. At the beginning of his presidency, in April 2009, he said in a speech in Prague: “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a responsibility to act.”
It has not acted decisively yet, and it is unlikely to do so before Obama's presidency ends next January. All he can claim is a deal that probably prevents Iran from becoming the next nuclear power, and a controversial trillion-dollar programme to modernise US nuclear weapons while reducing the actual numbers. But if the remaining weapons have more accuracy and higher yields, have you actually achieved anythingIJ
Obama's heart is certainly in the right place. He has held four nuclear security summits during his presidency, mainly aimed at improving the custody measures meant to keep the weapons out of the wrong hands, and getting the nuclear powers to move away from launch-on-warning postures that keep everybody at hair-trigger alert. But it's hard to get the world's attention when the threat of nuclear war seems low, and almost impossible to get real concessions out of the great powers when it seems high.