Facing a nuclear past, not fixing a post-nuclear future: Editorial

The president has long been drawn to the ideal of a world without atomic weapons. His trip to Japan will encourage the vision, but the gritty realpolitik of the region renders it a distant dream.

What Barack Obama will see, when on Friday he becomes the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, is a large esplanade lined with trees, with a cenotaph monument to the victims of the A-bomb, with the words: “the error of the past will not be repeated”. In the memorial park, he will see the gutted, skeletal, dome-shaped building that was once an exhibition hall; it has been preserved as the only structure left standing in the area where the Enola Gay dropped its charge at 8:15am, on 6 August 1945. He will also visit a museum exhibiting pictures of the city before and after the blast, as well as descriptions of what its inhabitants suffered in the inferno.