US President Barack Obama will leave on May 21 for his first trip to Vietnam and his 10th trip to Asia as president, a trip that his aides said "demonstrates Obama's focus on the Asia-Pacific region".

The trip from May 21-28 will take Obama to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. On May 25, Obama will depart for Japan to attend the G7 summit and end his trip with a visit to Hiroshima.

Obama will visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, a place that serves to commemorate the people who were killed in the atomic bombing of the Japanese city on Aug 6, 1945, which hastened the end of World War II. Most of the 70,000 people killed instantly were civilians.

Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, said the visit is not about issuing an apology.

"And of course the American people are extraordinarily proud of the generation of service members who fought in World War II at a time of maximum territorial nations. They have a revered place in our society," he told a conference call on Thursday.

Michael Green, senior vice-president for Asia, and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said a majority of Americans and a large majority of historians in the US believe that the atomic bombing was necessary to shorten the war and forestall an invasion of Kyushu, which would have led to many more casualties.

Rhodes emphasized that the visit is to pay tribute to the enormous suffering and loss of innocents and also to pursue a world without nuclear weapons, a proposal by Obama in 2009 that won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama has been criticized in the past year for his efforts to spend $1 trillion in the next 30 years to upgrade the US' nuclear weaponry.

A possible US lifting of an arms ban on Vietnam has made headlines in the past days. Daniel Kristenbrink, senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, said on Wednesday that all of the sales since the US enacted a partial lifting in 2014 on maritime-related articles are reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

"And human rights considerations are a part of that process," he said.

Rhodes said a decision on the issue has not been finalized. He expects it to be discussed by Obama in his meetings with Vietnamese leaders.

"We are looking at it, not narrowly in the context of simply whether or not to lift the ban, but rather where is our relationship going " he said.

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chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 05/20/2016 page1)