By Takaki Tominaga

LAS VEGAS, Nevada, Aug. 6 Kyodo, An atomic bomb exhibition organized by the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for Atomic Bomb Victims opened at the Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada on Saturday, with about 200 visitors attending the opening ceremony.

About 40 pictures and 20 personal items telling the story of the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 are on exhibit.

"It was intriguing to see what happened to the city and people with just one atomic bomb," said 16-year-old Arialle Bools, a high school student in Las Vegas. "I've never seen pictures like this, and I've learned a lot about things the school never teaches."

At the opening ceremony for the exhibition, which runs through Aug. 27, a survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki shared his personal story and called for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide.

Kazuo Maruta, a 74-year-old "hibakusha" (atomic bomb survivor) and member of the Nagasaki Foundation for the Promotion of Peace, was 13 years old when the atomic bomb was dropped, three days after the first bomb destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

He had just finished a school English exam and was relaxing at home about 1.3 kilometers from the hypocenter. He heard the roar of a B-29 bomber, with which he had become familiar, and the next thing he remembered was a powerful blueish-white light flashing in front of his face.

"What it looked like was something like hundreds or even thousands of camera flash bulbs going off right in front of my face, and I instinctively got down on the ground but at the same moment my body was thrown up into the air by the force of the blast," Maruta told the audience.

"It felt as if I was going through a pitch-black tunnel where there was a tremendous sand storm. To this day, what I remember most about that moment was that I distinctly felt it was the moment of my death," he said.

But it was not Maruta's last moment, and he later saw lots of people scorched from head to foot flocking to the river to quench their thirst and lots of dead bodies piled up like charcoal on the river banks when he fled the devastated city.

One hundred of his 300 school mates died in the blast, and Maruta said his heart still aches when he thinks about them.

Maruta said he believes it is the obligation of atomic bomb survivors to work for world peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons.

"Currently there are about 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world and it seems to us that the threat of another nuclear bombing is actually growing," he said.

"May Nagasaki be the last place on this earth to experience an atom bomb," he concluded, and the audience responded with a standing ovation.

Kelly Miles from Las Vegas, who had mixed feeling about nuclear weapons, felt that her perception had changed after listening to Maruta's speech.

"The importance of getting rid of nuclear weapons has become a more personal issue for me," she said. "We need to keep telling this message to the public."

However, Ted Tedesco, a 60-year-old veteran from Las Vegas, felt the contents of the exhibition and the information in Maruta's speech were very one-sided. He said there was no discussion of why World War II started or why the United States needed to develop nuclear weapons.

"They started the war, not us," Tedesco said. "If we had attacked Japan without dropping atomic bombs, there would have been more victims from both countries, probably millions of them."

Maruta said he appreciates the differences in reaction and opinion among the visitors, but believes the message from the people of Nagasaki is well understood to the American people who visited the museum. He said he thinks it is "a successful first step" in promoting the need to abolish nuclear weapons.

There was also a screening of the film "The Angelus Bell," which depicts the life of the late physician Tatsuichiro Akizuki who treated victims while he himself was being exposed to radiation. Akizuki died last October.

2006-08-06 19:23:41JST