Publications

"I think the president would like to do it," John Roos, President Barack Obama's former ambassador to Tokyo, said the other day about a possible Obama visit to Hiroshima when he attends the Group of Seven Summit next month in Japan. "He is a person who bends over backwards to show respect to history, and it does advance his agenda."

That a visit to Hiroshima, on which President Harry Truman dropped the world's first deployed atomic bomb, would advance Obama's agenda is clear. He has long envisioned a world without nuclear weapons, announced steps to pursue it in a high-profile speech in Prague in April of 2009, and continues to push for U.S.-Russian cuts in nuclear arsenals and global efforts to secure loose nuclear materials.