The last surviving member of the crew that dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima has died. Theodore VanKirk (93) was the navigator on the Enola Gay aircraft.

The bomb killed 140,000 people. In 2005, VanKirk said he would like to see the weapons abolished.

Mr VanKirk died Monday at the retirement home where he lived in the US state of Georgia.

The B-29 Superfortress plane carrying 12 crew members dropped the first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th in 1945.

Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered.

The bombing hastened the end of the second world war. But whether or not the United States should have used the atomic bomb is still being debated today.

"I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run" Mr VanKirk said in a 2005 interview. "There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese".

But he also said the experience of World War II also showed him "that wars don't settle anything".

He spoke about his experiences at the University of West Georgia in 2010.