About 400 people demonstrated in a weekend event not far from the Nevada Test Site where hundreds of nuclear tests were held up until the 1990s, said Paul Colbert, spokesman for the pacifist group Nevada Desert Experience.

The Thursday-through-Sunday protest event includes conferences, workshops and concerts, organizers said.

Another demonstration was set for a location near Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the Hiroshima bomb was made.

Hundreds of pacifists and Buddhists were due to hold a silent demonstration outside Lawrence-Livermore labs in California.

In Crawford, Texas, where President George W. Bush was vacationing, a Hiroshima survivor and a US soldier who was held at a prison camp near the Japanese city in August 1945 marked the 60th anniversary of the world's first atomic attack there, calling for a worldwide end to nuclear arms.

The Hiroshima bombing killed more than 140,000 people either immediately or in the months that followed, from horrific burns or radiation. The United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, killing another 70,000 people. Emperor Hirohito surrendered on August 15.

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