As other protests around the US echoed their sentiments, Hiroshima survivors Satoru Konishi and Paul Ritthaler recounted their experiences in Crawford, with Konishi branding the Hiroshima bomb an "atrocity" which killed mostly civilians.

"Only one percent of the dead were soldiers," said Konishi, 76, a shipyard worker in the Japanese city when the bomb fell on August 6, 1945.

"The atrocity of the atomic bombing is difficult to explain," said Konishi, who for years has pressed for abolishing nuclear weapons.

"I remember people with swollen faces. I couldn't understand what had happened to the city," he added about the attack, which leveled the city, killing more than 140,000 people.

Ritthaler, 87, was frail and spoke with the aid of his wife, Betty, about his opposition to nuclear weapons.

Betty Ritthaler said her husband was held with another 700 prisoners of war at a camp midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where a second bomb fell on August 9, 1945, killing 70,000.

"They all showed symptoms of radiation," she said, noting that the US Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledged that only recently.

"The bomb was not only dropped on the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was dropped on the whole humanity," added Konishi, who became a professor of German literature at the University of Tokyo after the war.

Meanwhile thousands of anti-nuclear protestors held local commemorations around the US, showing films and photo exhibits on Hiroshima, holding readings of accounts from the devastated city, and floating candle-lit lanterns down rivers.

In the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Watertown, a few dozen peace activists placed stark shadow drawings around the city to remind people of the human shadows burnt into the streets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the bombs, said organizer Tony Palomba.

Protests, meanwhile, were held near US nuclear test and weapons sites Saturday.

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

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

And hundreds of pacifists and Buddhists were due to hold a silent vigil outside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a center of nuclear weapons technology research, miming "the sound of no bombs dropping", said Tara Dorabji of Seeds of Change.

"This is a call to stop development of a whole new generation of bombs," Dorabji said.

Livermore "is a primary facility that creates nuclear weapons in the world," she said.

"It was picked to create a bunker-busting bomb designed to go underground and spew up radioactive dust," she added.

An estimated 210,000 people are estimated to have died from the two atomic bombs, either immediately or in the months that followed, from horrific burns or radiation.

But according to newly unearthed documents, a Japanese navy minister at the time called the bombings and the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan, which led to Tokyo's surrender in World War II, "God's gifts".

According to documents released Friday by the US National Security Archive, Mitsumasa Yonai told an adviser to the Japanese ruling elite that the two events provided a good excuse to surrender at a time when Japanese hostility to Emperor Hirohito and his government was rising.

The conversation was among the first published translations of Japanese accounts of key high level meetings and discussions in Tokyo leading to the end of the war, the archive said.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.