POPE Francis attacked the “steady erosion” of arms control agreements by world powers and called on all nuclear weapons states to give up their arsenals today.

The Pope began his Japan trip in Nagasaki, a city famed for its destruction by the second US atomic bombing at the end of the second world war as well as for its history of Christian missionaries – many of whom were martyred, as depicted in the Japanese novel Silence.

He spoke to survivors of the 1945 nuclear attack, one of whom, Yoshiko Kajimoto, was a 14-year-old working in a factory one-and-a-half miles from the point where the bomb struck.

“No-one in this world can imagine such a scene of hell,” she said, describing the “blue light” that tore apart the building she was in and people she saw while being evacuated: “Their bodies were so burned and totally red. Their faces swollen to double size, their lips hanging loose, both hands held out with burnt skin hanging from them. They no longer looked human.”