TOKYO - Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue on Wednesday said that Japan should join a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.

The mayor made the call during a ceremony to mark the 72nd anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

In his Peace Declaration delivered at an annual ceremony in the city's Peace Park to commemorate the lives lost on Aug 9, 1945, Taue said: "A strong sense of anxiety is spreading across the globe that in the not too distant future these weapons could actually be used again.

"Nagasaki must be the last place to suffer an atomic bombing," he said.

A bell tolled as thousands of people, including aging survivors and relatives of victims, observed a minute's silence at 11:02 am (0202 GMT), the exact moment that the blast struck on Aug 9, 1945 in the closing days of World War II.

Taue said that the Japanese government's position on nuclear weapons is "incomprehensible".

"The Japanese government's stance of not even participating in the diplomatic negotiations for the Nuclear Prohibition Treaty is quite incomprehensible to those of us living in the cities that suffered atomic bombings," the mayor said at the Peace Park.

He implored Japan to join the treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons.

Taue also said the government of Japan should "affirm to the world its commitment to the pacifist ethos of the Constitution of Japan, which firmly renounces war".

His remark comes at a time when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party have been eyeing making Japan's first-ever postwar amendment to the pacifist charter, a move that has proved politically, publicly and internationally decisive.

In a speech made by Abe to mark the anniversary, he said that both nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states need to work toward nuclear abolition.

The US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days after its nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

Conservative estimates put the numbers of those killed and wounded as a result of the attack at 150,000 in Hiroshima and 75,000 in Nagasaki.

Many in Japan feel the attacks amount to war crimes because they targeted civilians and due to the unprecedented destructive nature of the weapons.

But many people in the US believe they hastened the end of a bloody conflict, and ultimately saved lives, thus justifying the bombings.

Xinhua - Afp