The city of Nagasaki marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing Sunday with calls to abolish nuclear weapons and halt the Japanese government's push to loosen restrictions on what its military can do.
With Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the audience, a representative of Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors told an annual ceremony that security legislation introduced by Abe's government goes against the wishes of the survivors and ``will lead to war.''
Representatives from 75 countries, including U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, were among those gathered under a tall white canopy to shade them from the sun on a 31-degree-Celsius morning at Nagasaki Peace Park.
As a bell tolled, they observed a minute of silence at 11:02 a.m., the time when the a U.S. B-29 plane dropped the atomic bomb, killing more than 70,000 people and helping to prompt Japan's World War II surrender. The first atomic bomb in Hiroshima three days earlier killed an estimated 140,000.