HIROSHIMA, September 3, 2008 (AFP) - US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won praise Wednesday for becoming the most senior sitting American official to visit Japan's atom bomb memorial at Hiroshima.

Pelosi, second in line to the presidency after Vice President Dick Cheney, on Tuesday laid flowers at a memorial in the southwestern Japanese city, which was obliterated by a US nuclear bomb on August 6, 1945, near the end of World War II.

Her visit to the memorial was splashed on the front pages of local newspapers, which noted that no sitting US president or vice president had visited the site.

Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon visited the city out of office.

Pelosi was in Hiroshima for a meeting of parliament speakers of the Group of Eight major industrial powers.

'I believe it was significant that they directly saw and heard the city's experience after the nuclear attack,' Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said.

'I think they got the messages from the survivors -- we must not make the same mistake again,' Akiba said.

The local Chugoku Shimbun newspaper put its report of Pelosi's visit ahead of Japan's political vacuum after the prime minister's sudden resignation.

'The participation of Ms Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker of the United States who comes from the very party that dropped the atomic bomb, is not insignificant,' the newspaper said in its editorial.

Like Truman, Pelosi is a Democrat.

'It would be difficult for the US president to visit the site of the nuclear bombings, but we hope that this will lead to a visit in the future' by the president, the Chugoku Shimbun said.

More than 140,000 people were killed in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, either instantly or in the days and weeks that followed as they succumbed to radiation or horrific burns.

The US dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki three days later, killing another 70,000 people. Japan surrendered less than a week later, ending World War II.

Debate continues on the merit of the bombings, whether they helped bring the war to an end or were an unnecessary, and perhaps experimental, atrocity.

The influential Asahi Shimbun ran a front page photograph in its local edition showing Pelosi laying flowers but questioned whether the visit was more than symbolic.

'Did the horrific reality of the atomic bombing 63 years ago move the hearts of the speakers from the United States and Russia, which together possess more than 90 percent of nuclear arms?' the liberal newspaper asked rhetorically.

Bomb survivors 'remain hopeful but sceptical at the same time' about nuclear arms reduction, the Asahi said.

The best-selling Yomiuri Shimbun said there were no signs the US was prepared to rescind nuclear weapons and noted that the meeting had yielded little progress on this point.

'It is difficult to realistically expect 'nuclear arms reduction' as discussed at this meeting,' the Yomiuri said.