Biden Pays Silent Tribute to Victims of Hiroshima Bomb

Instead, Mr. Obama, who made global nuclear disarmament a long-term goal, sought to use his visit to outline his vision for “a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening” — a notion that seems even further from reality seven years later.

A B-29 Superfortress named the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb, named Little Boy, on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. The blast generated heat close to 14,000 degrees Fahrenheit by one calculation and destroyed or damaged 60,000 of the city’s 90,000 buildings; an estimated 140,000 people died, most of them civilians. A second bomb was dropped three days later on Nagasaki. Within a week, Japan had announced that it would surrender, bringing an end to the deadliest war in human history.

Debate has raged ever since about President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use the newly developed weapon without a more explicit warning or a demonstration, a decision justified as the best way to force the military-dominated leadership in Tokyo to give up without forcing the United States to mount a bloody amphibious invasion of the home islands.

Hiroshima has long since been rebuilt into a vibrant city of 1.2 million and a manufacturing hub known for heavy industries, such as automobiles, steel and shipbuilding. Bustling shopping areas and lush, tree-filled parkland leave little sense of its legacy of death. The advance of time has left fewer hibakusha, as the survivors are known.

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said that how that legacy can be translated into reducing the risk of a new Hiroshima “will be the most important legacy of this G7 summit” but will require active presidential engagement.

“Preventing arms racing, proliferation and nuclear war is a global endeavor,” Mr. Kimball said. “But history shows there is no substitute for U.S. leadership in reducing nuclear dangers, and there is no better time than now for President Biden outline his plan to renew nuclear risk reduction and disarmament diplomacy to move us back from the brink.”