President Obama hasn’t said yet whether he’ll visit Hiroshima when he’s in Japan next month. But he’s being encouraged to do so and even, by some, to apologize for America’s use of the atomic bomb in 1945.
Following is the speech I’d like to hear:
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Friends, as we gather here to reflect on the first use of an atomic bomb, I call your attention to the bottle of liquid on the pedestal beside me. It contains a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids.
Now I am depositing into it the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to me in the first year of my presidency. The Nobel committee cited my vision of a world without nuclear weapons.
At the time I said I felt humbled. But never more so than today at the place where American GIs, by dint of enormous physical and moral courage, delivered the blow that proved fatal to a terrible tyranny.
It’s now more than 70 years since their vanguard appeared in the sky over this city and, for the first time in human history, unsheathed the atomic sword. All of us stand in awe of their deeds.
It is appropriate that we are here. The generation of Americans who, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, arose in what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “their righteous might,” is now passing from this mortal coil.
This generation included not only the GIs who smote the tyrannies in Europe and Asia but also the giants of physics who gave them the weapon that finally won the fight. One of those giants was a Dane, Niels Bohr.
Bohr won his own Nobel Prize in 1922, but sold it to raise money for refugees. At his institute, he was asked to safeguard the Nobel prizes won by two anti-Hitler Germans, Max von Laue and James Franck.
As the Nazis closed in, Bohr conspired with another colleague, George de Hevesy, to hide prizes of Franck and von Laue. They dissolved them in a jar of acid, just as I have done before you today.
Bohr eventually made his way to freedom in America. It was there that, in league with other refugees, Bohr joined with Americans in the race to develop an atomic bomb.
I’ve heard the calls to apologize for America’s decision to use such a bomb to bring the war to an early end. But no American president has ever done that — or ever will.
Nor have we ever sought an apology from Japan, though many have been offered, including by your emperor. All we demanded of Japan was the unconditionality of its surrender.
That surrender was signed aboard the 63rd American battleship, USS Missouri, as it lay in Tokyo Bay. The surrender placed your country under the rule of General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur used his discretion wisely, preserving a role for your emperor, meting out justice to your war criminals and crafting your constitution. I don’t mind saying that you have kept your part.
This is a fit moment to pay tribute to the gains you’ve made in the decades that have followed. On behalf of my countrymen, I extend congratulations for all that you have achieved in our years of alliance.
It’s a reminder that history takes surprising turns. After the war was won, the jar of acid in which the gold medals of Franck and Laue had been dissolved was discovered on the shelf where they’d been inconspicuously placed.
The solution was reversed in a lab, and the gold removed. It was struck again into Nobel medallions, which were returned to the original winners. The story has been widely told, including on our National Public Radio.
Now, humbled by what happened here, I make a pledge. I am placing this bottle of acid containing my own Nobel medal in the custody of the United States Army, whose airmen led the raid we remember today.
It is my will and testament that when my peaceful vision has been achieved, the gold will be taken out and the medal struck anew. And that it then be kept on the bridge of the Missouri, which now lies permanently at Pearl Harbor.