North Korea's official news agency is criticizing U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Hiroshima on Friday.

The Korean Central News Agency published a commentary Thursday calling the visit a "childish political calculation'' aimed at hiding Obama's identity as a "nuclear war lunatic" determined to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The commentary also accused Japan of trying to use the visit to masquerade as a victim and cover up its atrocities during World War II.

Obama is to become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the western Japanese city where U.S. forces dropped an atomic bomb in 1945. He has called for a world without nuclear weapons, and criticized North Korea's development of both nuclear and missile technology. (AP)