In September 2009, US Ambassador to Japan John Roos reported to the Obama administration that the Japanese government did not think it was a good idea for President Obama to visit Hiroshima to apologize for the US having dropped an atomic bomb on that city, a secret cable published by Wikileaks revealed.

Roos wrote the cable after his August meeting with Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka, reporting to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Japanese government felt “the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a ‘non-starter.’ While a simple visit to Hiroshima without fanfare is sufficiently symbolic to convey the right message, it is premature to include such program in the November visit.”

A senior White House official asserts to ABC News that there was never any plan for the president to apologize for Hiroshima. The cable does not state that the idea was from the U.S. Rather, Roos writes that Yabunaka thought that following President Obama’s call earlier that year for a world free of nuclear weapons, anti-nuclear groups would speculate as to whether he would visit Hiroshima.

Yabunaka recommended that President Obama’s November 2009 visit be focused mostly in Tokyo.

The cable was first reported by the Japan Times.

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” — a 8,900-pound uranium bomb – 31,000 feet above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing up to 70,000 Japanese citizens immediately, with another 70,000 speculated to have died from injuries including exposure to radiation.

On August 9, the US dropped a similar device on the Japanese port city of Nagasaki.