Scientists and nuclear experts from across the world on Thursday wrapped up their meeting in Japan with a call for all nuclear states to eliminate atomic weapons, and for nonnuclear states that depend on the extended nuclear umbrella to change their security policies.

In a declaration released at the end of the five-day Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs held in Nagasaki, a city devastated by the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing, participants touched on the sufferings of hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors, for the first time and urged world leaders to "heed their call now."

Pugwash meetings have been held twice in Japan, both in the city of Hiroshima, which suffered the world's first atomic bombing three days before Nagasaki, but the previous declarations did not refer to the suffering of hibakusha.