Hope and hype of Hiroshima can’t conceal Obama’s dismal record on nuclear disarmament

Seven years ago, in the Czech capital of Prague, Barack Obama delivered his first major foreign policy speech as president. To rapturous applause, he laid out his vision for “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. It earned him that year’s Nobel peace prize.

On Friday he will bookend his two terms in office with another appeal for nuclear disarmament, this time during a historic trip to Hiroshima. No other sitting US president has ever visited the Japanese city that was razed to the ground by a single atomic bomb in the final days of the second world war.

An estimated 140,000 people, almost all of them civilians, perished instantly in the vast inferno, or died within a few months from severe burns, blast injuries or radiation sickness. Many more succumbed years later to cancers and other radiation-related illnesses.

The president will make no apology on behalf of his nation for this horrific attack. That he has made clear. But most of the remaining survivors, known as hibakusha, have not demanded one. Their focus instead is on the future – how to realise the oft-cited, long-elusive goal of a nuclear weapon-free world, lest anyone else ever suffer as they have.