Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause. How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction how the very spark that marks us as a species - our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will - those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction. There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war - memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die - men, women, children no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. And yet, the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. The World War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Our early ancestors, having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood, used these tools not just for hunting, but against their own kind. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 in Japanese men, women and children thousands of Koreans a dozen Americans held prisoner. Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not so distant past. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself. PRESIDENT OBAMA: Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed.
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