US President Barack Obama stood on the hallowed ground of Hiroshima and declared it a fitting place to summon people everywhere to embrace the vision of a world without nuclear weapons. The first American president to visit the city where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb.

Around 140,000 people died after a U.S. warplane targeted wartime Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and 70,000 more perished in Nagasaki, where a second bomb was dropped three days later. Japan soon surrendered.

``Their souls speak to us,'' Obama said of the dead. ``They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and who we might become.''

``We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe,'' he said.

"We come to ponder the terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past," Obama said after laying a wreath at a Hiroshima peace memorial. "We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans and a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us."

"We have known the agony of war," he wrote in the guest book. "Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons."

"Amongst those nations like my own that own nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them," he said.

"We remember all the innocent killed in the arc of that terrible war and wars that came before, and wars that would follow. We have a shared responsibility to look directly in the eye of history," he said.

"I'm afraid I did not hear anything concrete about how he plans to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons," said Miki Tsukishita, 75. "A-bomb survivors including me are getting older. Just cheering his visit is not enough."

By Premji