What Will Obama Say in Hiroshima?

Every year, at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, Hiroshima is filled with thousands of visitors from all around the world. In a strange planetary communion, the crowd pays homage to the more than 100,000 Japanese who died in 1945, less than a month before the war was over. The crowd gathers in the square where, before World War II, there existed an exhibition hall, the remains of which were kept and transformed into a memorial of the atomic bomb.

When hundreds of white doves are released, to fly freely through Hiroshima’s skies, everyone is probably thinking of the horror of that summer day in 1945.

Next, amid the sentences from official speeches, many may be thinking the possibility of “total war” and the absolute abyss are not gone.

This Friday will be different. It’s not Aug. 6, but Barack Obama will be at Hiroshima.

Just the courage of it, going to the city where Americans launched the first atomic bomb, is a matter of news and a controversial decision. We expect nothing else from Obama. Ten presidents before him decided not to go to Hiroshima. Others have gone, but only after having left the White House, which is why this visit brings an incomparable lightness and sense of commitment.

It is easy to understand why. The issues that arise from the visit of a sitting North American president to Hiroshima are obvious. The issues behind dropping two atomic bombs, on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are challenging since in August 1945 everyone knew the war was practically won.

But today, 70 years later, a new set of issues is surpassing these historians.

In Prague in 2009, Barack Obama delivered one of the most important political speeches of his presidency. He chose the theme of nuclear disarmament to initiate the mandate and, in part, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for what he said in that intervention.

We expect Obama to end that cycle and to give further steps in Hiroshima. Six months are left before Obama leaves the White House, but experts in nuclear issues believe there is still time for significant and tangible measures, such as the proposal of a U.N. resolution for member states to commit toward not conducting nuclear tests. Obama could destroy some of his own arsenal and appeal to Russia to follow the gesture, and he could cancel programs for the purchase and modernization of the existing U.S. arsenal, which could cost several million dollars and include the construction of submarines and bombers with nuclear capacity.

The visit to Hiroshima is therefore looked upon with enormous expectation. It is considered the last opportunity for Obama to make history and to stop the current nuclear arms race, which is, silently, setting a new, dangerous military escalation.