Obama's Hiroshima Visit and the Strange Duality of Nuclear Weapons

Rod Lyon

Security, Asia

It’s going to be a neat trick for Obama to ensure that his visit reflects the strange duality of nuclear weapons: that they are both massively destructive and—for now—strategically irreplaceable.

The White House announced last week that President Obama would visit Hiroshima later this month, making him the first US president to do so. He won’t be apologizing for the US’s dropping of the atomic bomb, and some reports suggest he doesn’t even plan on making a major address there. It’s a case where Obama’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, of course. If he doesn’t make a major speech, commentators will see it as symptomatic of his continuing drift away from the anti-nuclear position he outlined in Prague in 2009. If he does, commentators will see the two speeches as the rhetorical bookends of an otherwise unremarkable legacy.

Actually, Obama’s legacy isn’t that underwhelming. He can point to a successful 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, a New START agreement with Russia, a nuclear deal with Iran, and a series of nuclear security summits. Yes, he has supported a modernization program for US nuclear forces, but the US is virtually the last nuclear power out of the blocks on modernization, not the first. As Robert Scher recently noted, the US now faces a situation where non-modernization would leave it with "a slow and unacceptable degradation in [its] ability to deter," facing off against other great powers which have already bitten the modernization bullet.