Obama won’t apologize for Hiroshima during trip to Japan

President Obama may visit Hiroshima when he travels to Japan late this month for a summit of key industrialized nations, but he will not apologize for the World War II decision to destroy that city with an atomic bomb, the White House said Monday.

Asked by Yahoo News whether Obama believes Japan deserves a formal apology for the August 6, 1945, bombing, White House press secretary Josh Earnest replied: “No, he does not.”

The question arose because John Kerry recently became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. Declaring the experience “gut-wrenching,” Kerry said he would urge Obama to make the trip.

“It tugs at all of your sensibilities as a human being. It reminds everybody of the extraordinary complexity of choices in war and of what war does to people, to communities, to countries, to the world,” Kerry said after his April 11 visit.

Obama has said, since at least November 2009, that he would like to visit Hiroshima, and also Nagasaki, the target of the second American nuclear bomb d-ropped in wartime.

“I certainly would be honored, it would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future,” he said at a press conference with Japan’s then prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama.

No word on whether Obama will visit Obama, a small city on Japan’s west coast.