Japan is marking the 72nd anniversary of the US nuclear attack on the western city of Hiroshima today, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and survivors attended an annual ceremony.

A report carried by Deutsch Presse-Agentur, dpa, said that thousands of participants observed a minute's silence in memory of victims at 08:15 a.m. (GMT 23:15 Saturday), the time when a US B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the city on 6th August, 1945.

The blast killed tens of thousands of residents instantly, and by the end of the year, some 140,000 people in total had died.

This year's ceremony followed the adoption by 122 United Nations members of the first treaty to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons. Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui hailed the adoption of the treaty, saying that those countries demonstrated their unequivocal determination to achieve abolition. "Given this development, the governments of all countries must now strive to advance further toward a nuclear-weapon-free world," the mayor said.

UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, sent a message to the ceremony, saying, "This measure is the result of a global campaign focused on the unacceptability of the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances," the UN chief said, continuing, " Yet our dream of a world free of nuclear weapons remains far from reality. The states possessing nuclear weapons have a special responsibility to undertake concrete and irreversible steps in nuclear disarmament."

However, Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, avoided touching on the treaty directly in his speech at Sunday's event. "For us to truly realise a 'world without nuclear weapons,' the participation of both nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states is necessary," Abe said.

In 1945, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, on Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu, three days after the Hiroshima bombing. Japan surrendered on 15th August.

source:Wam