It’s one of those acts for which history will honor the Obama’s presidency that, for a moment at least, he made Hiroshima the focus of the world’s attention. It was an appropriately solemn speech.. But, while dramatizing the horror of that bomb descending on a whole city, the president did not,, as been widely emphasized, issue an apology. We get why. It is still debated whether it was necessary to drop the bombs on the Japanese cities; but there is a debate. And there is still a tit-for-tat element to it. And indeed “tat” was horrible. The Japanese and their allies in Europe had of course started it and done unprecedentedly terrible things. Hiroshima was (in a sense) just holocaust for holocaust.
The fact is the only thing you can say is that everybody needs to apologize: that at that stage of human history we couldn’t figure out a better way. That that horrible war, with its 70 million deaths, most civilian, and unimaginable suffering; with its horrible beginnings and horrible ending was the best humankind could manage.
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