Obama in May to become 1st U.S. president to visit Hiroshima: officials

The planned trip by Obama to Hiroshima is regarded as a signal that the outgoing president is renewing his campaign to seek a world free of nuclear weapons.
Obama is likely to visit Hiroshima on May 27 after attending a two-day summit ending that day in Mie Prefecture, Japan, of leaders from the Group of Seven industrialized nations.
The White House is already in talks with the Japanese government on the plan, according to the U.S. officials. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may accompany Obama to Hiroshima.
Obama may lay a wreath at the cenotaph in Peace Memorial Park near ground zero, where there is a museum displaying artifacts of the atomic bomb victims and survivors, and he may deliver a speech in the city, the officials said.
Obama, who took office in 2009, was awarded that year's Nobel Peace Prize for his stated intention to seek a world without nuclear weapons.
A visit by a serving president to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which was also devastated by a U.S. atomic bomb in 1945, is expected to stir controversy in the United States due to concern it could be construed as an apology for the attacks. Many veterans and others see the atomic bombings as having been necessary to get Japan to surrender.
The White House has been finalizing the itinerary after major American news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post backed Obama's visit to Hiroshima in recent editorials.
The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945 and another on Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, bringing the war to an end.
The number of people -- most of them civilians -- who had died by the end of 1945 from the bombings is estimated at 140,000 in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki, according to the cities.
Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui and Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue have called on Obama to come to their cities to hear the survivors' stories of suffering as well as to show his commitment to seeking a world free of nuclear weapons.
Obama's planned visit to Hiroshima is likely to be made part of a wider Asian trip which will take him to Japan and to Vietnam.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, along with the Japanese and other G-7 foreign ministers, earlier this month laid a wreath at the cenotaph in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, near a point beneath where the bomb exploded. He was the first U.S. secretary of state to make such a visit.
During his first trip to Japan as president in 2009, Obama told a press conference in Tokyo that he would be "honored" to have the opportunity to visit the cities.
The highest-ranking U.S. official so far to have visited Hiroshima is Nancy Pelosi, who did so in 2008 as speaker of the House of Representatives. The House chief stands behind only the vice president in the line of succession to the U.S. presidency.
In 1984 Jimmy Carter, as a former American president, visited the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima.
Obama has sent U.S. ambassadors John Roos and Caroline Kennedy to the annual peace ceremonies in the atomic bombed cities since 2010. Rose Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, also attended the ceremony in Hiroshima last year.