Obuchi was responding to Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba's call for total nuclear disarmament as about 50,000 people, including many survivors, said silent prayers to mark the 54th anniversary of the day the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the ``Little Boy'' bomb 54 years ago.

Tadatoshi said it was because of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where people were still dying from the after effects of the bomb, that no third nuclear bomb had been used since then.

``They (the victims) prevented a third use of nuclear weapons,'' Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said.

Obuchi, however, said because of a series of regional conflicts stemming from ethnic and religious problems in the post cold war period had made the task of total nuclear disarmament all the more difficult.

Japan, which has alreadylaunched ``Tokyo forum declaration'' in a bid to impose total ban on nuclear weapons, has asked the UN to accept the declaration as an important document and distribute it to the international community as a disarmament paper.