Obama to make historic visit to Hiroshima

US President Barrack Obama will visit Hiroshima when he travels to Japan later in May for a summit of key industrialized nations, the White House announced on Tuesday. It will be the first visit to the city by a sitting president since World War II, but the Obama administration said he will not apologize for the

decision to destroy that city with an atomic bomb.

“He will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. Instead, he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future,” explained Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser.

Obama has said since at least November 2009 that he would like to visit Hiroshima and also Nagasaki, the target of the second American nuclear bomb dropped in wartime.

“I certainly would be honored; it would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future,” he said at a press conference with Japan’s then prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama.

Rhodes wrote Tuesday that Obama will visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on May 27.