President Joe Biden will not apologize for the World War II atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima during his visit to the city for the Group of Seven (G7) summit, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters en route to Japan.

Hiroshima is hosting the G7, and the city is the ancestral home of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Hiroshima has become a global center for peace and anti-nuclear activism since it was rebuilt following the 1945 bombing that killed 140,000 people in the closing weeks of the Second World War. Several members of Kishida’s family were among the victims.

Biden and other leaders of the G7 nations are scheduled to attend a ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Park and Memorial Museum on Friday. Analysts say the visit will have added significance in the face of repeated Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine and North Korea’s efforts to expand its nuclear program. Kishida will use the summit to push for nuclear disarmament, the Kyodo news agency reported.

But Biden won’t use the occasion to express regret for the U.S. bombing.

“He’ll be participating with the other G7 leaders in a wreath-laying and a few other events. But this is not, from his perspective, a bilateral moment,” Sullivan said on board Air Force One. “This is him, as one of the G7 leaders, coming to pay respects and — respects both for history but also respects to Prime Minister Kishida, who of course is from Hiroshima.”

Asked directly if the president would apologize, Sullivan replied, “No.”

The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and another on the city of Nagasaki three days later, the first-ever use of atomic weapons in warfare. The U.S. remains the only state ever to have used nuclear weapons. America justified the bombings as necessary to end a war that had killed an estimated 25 million people in the Asia Pacific region, according to historian Richard B. Frank.

Barack Obama was the first U.S. president to visit the Hiroshima memorial, during an official visit in 2016. He declined to apologize for the bombings, calling instead for a reduction of worldwide nuclear stockpiles.

A 2015 Pew survey found that 56% of Americans saw the bombings as justified and 34% did not. The result in Japan was more lopsided: Only 14% called bombing justified; 79% disagreed. But while many Japanese politicians have demanded an American apology, a 2016 survey of survivors of the Hiroshima bombing showed that 78.3% didn't want one, according to the BBC.

At the time of the Obama visit, former U.S. diplomat Grant Newsham told the Los Angeles Times, “If Obama apologizes at Hiroshima, it draws attention to Japanese behavior elsewhere in Asia during the ’30s and ’40s,” a reference to widespread atrocities committed by Japan’s wartime armed forces.