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A man watches a TV news program reporting about a missile launch of North Korea, at the Seoul Train Station in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, May 31, 2016. A North Korean missile launch likely failed on Tuesday, according to South Korea's military, the latest in a string of high-profile failures that tempers somewhat recent worries that Pyongyang was pushing quickly toward its goal of a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach America's mainland.
Seven decades after the U.S. launched an atomic attack in Hiroshima, President Barack Obama will become the first sitting president to visit the city Friday, traveling there to offer a reconciliatory balm for the still-painful knowledge of the devastation countries can inflict upon one another. By visiting Hiroshima, Obama is casting the powerful presidential spotlight on the haunted memories of one of history's darkest days.
When U.S. President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe make a historic visit to Hiroshima on Friday - the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited the site of the first atomic bomb attack - their words advocating nuclear disarmament will clash with real-world security necessities. Far from backing up the vision of a world without nuclear bombs that Obama laid out in a 2009 speech that helped secure a Nobel Peace Prize, his near-finished presidency has seen a multibillion-dollar modernization of the U.S. nuclear force.
By visiting Hiroshima, Barack Obama parachutes himself into a seemingly endless dispute among key U.S. allies and trading partners over World War II. In Tokyo's decades-long tug-of-war over history with its neighbors China and South Korea, it's the American president who could end up losing.