The appeal was made in Hiroshima at the annual convention of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, an organization dedicated to reducing and eliminating the threat posed by nuclear weapons and war.

Opportunities for lasting peace after the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Berlin Wall were frittered away, Pugwash council president M.S. Swaminathan said as he opened the meeting that lasts until Wednesday.

"What we witness instead is the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the rise of hatred and terrorism," he said.

"The prospect for nuclear terrorism and adventurism have become real. The voice of sanity of the survival of the 1945 nuclear annihilations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is yet to be heard," the Indian biologist said.

"This is unfortunate since they only know what hell on earth means," he said, noting the conference was "a wake-up call" to political leaders of the world.

After opening the meeting, participants visited the Hiroshima peace memorial park to mourn victims of the world's first atomic bombing on August

Some 140,000 people -- almost half the city's population at the time -- died immediately or in the months after the US nuclear attack from radiation injuries or horrific burns.

The Hiroshima bombing was followed by the dropping of a second atomic bomb on the southern Japan city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, leaving more than 70,000 people dead.

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