SALT LAKE CITY -- On Aug. 6, 1945, Dick Sherwood and Takashi Hiraoka were enemies.

Sherwood, then an eagle-eyed lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps, was piloting a B-29 over Hiroshima, Japan, assessing the damage caused 30 minutes earlier by the atomic bomb dropped by the crew of the Enola Gay. What he saw as he flew over the ruined city would give him nightmares, and continue to agitate him six decades later.

Hiraoka, who was born in Hiroshima, was then a teenager living in Korea, where his father was on assignment. He lost cousins in the blast and was surprised by the devastation when he returned home after the war. Three days later, the U.S. dropped another bomb, this one on Nagasaki, Japan.

But the aftermath of that blast turned both men into allies in the quest to stop nuclear war. On Monday, Sherwood, 88, who now lives in Salt Lake City, and the 80-year-old Hiraoka, a mayor of Hiroshima in the 1990s, met for the first time.

The meeting was arranged by the Utah Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Hiraoka, who was on a Utah speaking tour, had heard of Sherwood's work through a television documentary chronicling the former airman's visit to Hiroshima in 1995 -- the attack's 50th anniversary.

"The military institution says it is OK to kill, and use the most horrible weapons, and that killing the enemy is heroic," Hiraoka said through an interpreter. "I respect Dick for having humanity over his military obligations."

Sherwood said he was chosen to fly the damage-assessment mission because of his superior eyesight. But what he saw left him as devastated as the city below him. He flew low enough that he could see burned survivors scrambling for help.

Hiraoka said some of those people scrambled when the plane flew over because they were afraid that the Americans were dropping another bomb.

For his part, as he viewed the carnage below, Sherwood recalls thinking, "What a lost cause the war has become."

His son, Kim Sherwood, said the experience so bothered his father that he never told his family the details. But the pain was obvious. The elder Sherwood gave up flying after the war and switched his major in college from engineering to sociology and the Russian language. He would go on to protest the MX missile and organize peace walks in the former Soviet Union.

Hiraoka said when he returned to Hiroshima after the war, the city looked like a burned-over field, the same as Tokyo and Osaka after American firebombing raids. But Hiroshima was worse, he said, because it was done by a single bomb, and one that would continue to claim lives years later through radiation sickness.

Sherwood and Hiraoka challenge the assertion made by the late Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, who flew the Enola Gay, that the bombing saved lives by driving Japan to surrender -- as well as deterred future world wars. Hiraoka said he discovered, while working as a newspaper reporter after the war, that Japan's government was negotiating for peace in the spring of 1945.

"The regular people (and) the government wanted to surrender, but the military people didn't want to surrender," Hiraoka said. "I believe it is the stubbornness of the military people that caused the bombing of Japan."

Building more bombs does not deter nuclear war, the newfound friends said. It only makes it that much more inevitable. The only way to peace, they said, is to scrap the bombs and teach people to recognize their dignity as human beings.

"We can outlaw chlorine gas, but we cannot even talk about outlawing atomic weapons," Sherwood lamented.