Hiroshima, Japan (CNN)U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday
assailed GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump -- though not by name -for raising the prospect that Japan and South Korea could seek their own
nuclear weapons during a visit to Hiroshima, Japan, a city that knows the
horrors of nuclear warfare firsthand.
"Any suggestion by any candidate for high public office that we should be
building more weapons and giving them to a country like Korea or Japan are
absurd on their face and run counter to everything that every president,
Republican or Democrat alike, has tried to achieve ever since World War II,"
he told the press at a news conference.
Kerry is the first sitting secretary of state to visit the revered memorial to the
nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
Kerry, E.U. Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini and other foreign
ministers from the Group of Seven, who are in Japan for two days of talks,
visited the site of the world's first use of an atomic weapon in warfare earlier
Monday.
"It is a gut-wrenching display. It tugs at all of your sensibilities as a human
being," Kerry said of the memorial.
"It reminds everybody of the extraordinary complexity of choices of war and of
what war does to people, to communities, to countries, to the world. This
was a display that I will personally never forget."
Their trip was a stark reminder that looming over the current round of G7 talks
is the history of the city they're being held in. It also came a day after a State
Department official said Kerry won't apologize for the twin bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hiroshima was devastated when the United States dropped an atomic bomb
on the city in August 1945. The bomb, which led to the end of World War II,
killed 140,000 people -- either initially from the impact or later due to radiation
exposure.
Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on the port city of
Nagasaki, killing about 70,000 people.
Under tight security, the...