Hiroshima victims still suffered long after the bomb was dropped

Little interest was evinced by the Allies in offering medical treatment to bomb victims, writes Terry Prone

Barack Obama visited Hiroshima this week, the first American president to do so. That’s something. He met and listened to hibakusha — the survivors of the explosion whose bodies and lives were re-shaped by the atomic bomb. That’s something, too.

He did not, however, apologise for America dropping the bomb. That might have been a step too far. It was more manageable to talk vaguely of lessons learned and moralities refined than to break faith with the central tenet of American, and indeed Allied, belief regarding the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: that the dropping of those bombs constituted the single factor that forced Japan to surrender and abandon a war to which they were committed with an ideological ferocity unreachable by military attrition.