Nagasaki remembers atomic victims

Thousands of people gathered in the Japanese city of Nagasaki on Monday to mark 65 years since the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city during the Second World War.

In 1945, the nuclear bomb hit Nagasaki three days after Japan's city of Hiroshima was struck by another US atomic bomb. Collectively, they killed about 80,000 people.

The death toll from the bombings is updated each year by the Japanese government, as residents continue to suffer from their after-effects, including detrimental levels of radiation.

After a minute's silence to honour the dead, Japan's prime minister Naoto Kan, who attended the gathering, spoke of the country's self-imposed ban on the possession and production of nuclear arms.

Al Jazeera's Wayne Hay reports.

[August 9, 2010]