Sixty-six years on: Nagasaki remembers bombing

Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan at
the Nagasaki Peace Park in Nagasaki. (AP)

The United States sent its first representative on Tuesday to the annual memorial for the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, one of two horrific attacks that led Japan to surrender in World War II.

The Nagasaki bombing by the United States 66 years ago killed about 80 000 people. Three days earlier, the US had dropped another nuclear bomb that killed up to 140 000 in the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

US Charge d'Affaires James P Zumwalt, the first American representative to visit the Nagasaki memorial, said that President Barack Obama hoped to work with Japan toward his goal "of realising a world without nuclear weapons" -- a commitment Japan has made repeatedly since the war.

Obama last year sent Ambassador John Roos to the 65th anniversary memorial of the bombing in Hiroshima, and Roos visited Nagasaki twice last year on other dates, according to the US Embassy in Japan.

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