In 2009, Barack Obama wanted to visit Hiroshima and apologize for the United States’ atomic bombing of the location, according to ABC News. The Japanese government told the ambassador it was a bad idea, so the trip proposal was nixed.

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.”

Why was the president going to apologize?

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski were intended — and succeeded in — bringing about a swift end to an illegal war of regional conquest launched by Japan a decade earlier. The alternative plan was a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands, which military experts predicted would cost the lives of up to a million American troops and as many Japanese civilians.

You know how bloody the invasion alternative was projected to be? We printed so many Purple Heart medals in preparation for the invasion that we’re still using the stockpile today. Through Korea, Vietnam, and all the wars and battles fought since 1945 — we still haven’t existed our stockpile of Purple Hearts manufactured for that invasion alone.

President Truman took the swifter, more humane route when he ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It provided the Japanese emperor an out — the ability to surrender. And besides, fire bombing of strategic Tokyo was costing more than 100,000 lives. Even the other bombing alternatives weren’t peachy.

So this idea that we were going to apologize for taking the route with the fewer casualties — one that ensured a swift surrender and start of peacetime — in order to end a war of conquest the other side had launched…it’s idiotic. We have no need to apologize. And the Japanese government clearly isn’t interested in an apology.