Shadow of Nanjing hangs over Hiroshima

The White House announced on Tuesday that US President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima later this month when he visits the country to attend the G7 Summit. It will be the first visit by a sitting US president. However, it would be wrong to interpret this as a message that the US is apologizing for the atomic bomb it dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, which killed tens of thousands of Japanese.

Hiroshima was the target for the world's first use of a nuclear weapon. AUS Army Air Force B-29 called the Enola Gay - the name of the flight commander's mother - dropped the Uranium-235 implosive device. Around 75,000 people were killed immediately and another estimated 125,000 died in the following years from the radiation and other injuries they sustained.

Three days later, the only other use of nuclear weapons against a human-in-habited target so far took place, when another US B-29 bomber carrying a more powerful plutonium device destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki.