At Hiroshima, Obama calls for 'moral revolution'

American President Barack Obama laid a wreath at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on Friday, telling an audience that included survivors of America's atomic bombing in 1945 that technology as devastating as nuclear arms demands a "moral revolution".

Thousands of Japanese lined the route of the presidential motorcade to the memorial in the hopes of glimpsing Obama, the first sitting American president to visit the most potent symbol of the dawning of the nuclear age. Many watched the ceremony on their cellphones.

"Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed," Obama said in opening his speech at the memorial.

"Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us," Obama said, adding that such technology "requires a moral revolution as well."

In an emotional moment afterward, Obama embraced and shook hands with survivors of the attack. The first of those survivors, Sunao Tsuboi, a chairman of the Hiroshima branch of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, gripped Obama's hand and did not let go until he had spoken to him for some time.

© 2016 The New York Times News Service