LIVERMORE -- On the 63rd anniversary of the last time an atomic bomb was used in warfare, anti-war activists gathered outside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Saturday to protest the facilities work on nuclear weapons.

The protests centered around a speech by Nobuaki Hanaoka, a retired Methodist minister from San Francisco, who lived in Nagasaki with his family at the time of the bombing.

"I was seven-and-a-half months old when the bomb fell,” said Hanaoka. Our family was spared from the effects of the blast and the heat, but we were exposed to the radiation."

Hanaoka's mother, sister and brother all died from leukemia in the years following the bombing.

Anti-nuclear activists are critical of weapon's research at the Lawrence Livermore lab, which they claim could endanger the Bay Area after a major accident or terrorist attack.