A minute’s silence was observed today in Hiroshima, exactly the time the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city 80 years ago, during an annual ceremony attended by more than a hundred countries.

On August 6, 1945, at 08:15, the US armed forces dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing some 140,000 people.

Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped by a US aircraft in Nagasaki, in southern Japan.

These bombings, which precipitated the end of World War II, are the only instances in history of nuclear weapons being used in wartime.

“We don’t have much time left, and we face a greater nuclear threat than ever before,” Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese survivor base organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its pursuit of nuclear weapons abolition, said in a statement before the ceremony.