Hiroshima city marked the 63rd anniversary of the world's first nuclear bombing. The Mayor pleads with the U.S. to abolish nuclear weapons in the world.

About 45,000 people including the Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and the Hiroshima City Mayor attended the anniversary held at a memorial to the dead. They offered special prayers at 8:15 am, the exact time in 1945 when a single nuclear bomb from the Enola Gay U.S. aircraft dropped it on the city.

The bomb killed more than 140,000 people and injured tens of thousands of others with severe radiation burns.

The Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba doesn't want the incident to happen again and urged United States, which is one of three countries that oppose a UN resolution submitted by Japan calling for a unilateral ban of nuclear arms to endorse the ban.

He told the audience:

"We can only hope that the president of the United States elected this November will listen conscientiously to the majority, for whom the top priority is human survival,"

Akiba said the impact of the bombings is still felt by the survivors, many of them over 75 now. The city plans to launch a study to understand the psychological impact of the experience.

"This study should teach us the grave import of the truth, born of tragedy and suffering, that the only role for nuclear weapons is to be abolished,"

Many children gathered in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome for a lantern march. The survivors burned incense before the dawn broke.

11-year-old school girl Honoka Imai told the service.

"Children who evacuated buildings or went to work at factories on that day have not returned 63 years on... the atomic bomb deprived them of normal life,"

Most countries have attended the ceremony via their representatives, but the U.S. Britain, France and North Korea have never attended the ceremony, all of them have nuclear arsenal.

Three days later Nagasaki will repeat a similar service, which was bombed on August 9, 1945, killing 70,000 people.

Since then many countries like Pakistan, India, Israel and others have developed nuclear bombs and others like Iran, Saudi Arabia, also want to develop their own bombs. The nuclear bombs the many countries have now are hundred or thousand times more powerful.

Hope Hiroshima and Nagasaki incidents don't repeat again, if they do it will be far more deadly and devastating as if these incidents were not deadly enough.