The pilot of the plane that ushered in the age of atomic warfare with the first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, died on Thursday at the age of 92, a spokesman said.

Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr, born in Quincy, Illinois on February 23, 1915, whose B-29 bomber dubbed the Enola Gay dropped the 9,000-pound ‘Little Boy’ bomb on August 6, 1945, died at his home in  Columbus, Ohio. He had been suffering from heart problems.

Tibbets was more than just the pilot. He was instrumental in redesigning and testing the plane used to carry the bomb and training the men needed to deliver it. Tibbets never regretted the bombing that led to the end of World War II but at a horrific price: 140,000 dead immediately and 80,000 other Japanese succumbing in the aftermath.

“That’s what it took to end the war,” he told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003. “I went out to stop the killing all over.” Aware that not everyone agrees with his view, Tibbets asked his family to cremate him so his grave site would not be desecrated.

However, in Japan on Friday survivors of the attack voiced regret that Tibbets died without saying sorry. “He did not apologise, arguing, like the American government, that the bombing saved millions of lives by ending the war,” said Nori Tohei, 79, who survived the bombing. “But I wanted him to visit Hiroshima and take a look at what he did as a human being,” said Tohei.