Tokyo, 22 April, /AJMEDIA/
A Japanese nuclear disarmament forum, set up under the initiative of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, has called on the international community to strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The International Group of Eminent Persons for a World without Nuclear Weapons issued the message, which comes around a month before Kishida hosts a Group of Seven summit in his home constituency of Hiroshima, devastated by a U.S. atomic bomb in 1945.
The forum also emphasized the importance of conforming to international norms, in an apparent warning against China’s military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region and North Korea’s nuclear and missile development.
“The international community faces an array of grave and unprecedented nuclear challenges,” the message said, adding that threats of actual use are “higher than ever” and risks of nuclear proliferation are “rising in various parts of the world.”
The group, launched in December, will submit the message to the preparatory committee for the 2026 review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is scheduled to begin in late July, after exchanging views with Kishida’s government.
The Japanese government, meanwhile, has been eager to make use of the message as a basis for discussion at the G7 summit in May, as Kishida has voiced willingness to deliver his vision of a nuclear-free world at the upcoming gathering.
Takashi Shiraishi, the chancellor of the Prefectural University of Kumamoto in southwestern Japan who chairs the 15-member forum, said at a press conference in Tokyo via online that the message reflects “our strong sense of crisis.”
The message called it “a moral imperative and a shared responsibility of all states” to cooperate in maintaining the NPT regime, which is a “cornerstone of the international security architecture.”
The forum mainly consists of scholars. Among the 15 members, 12 are from 11 foreign nations — the nuclear powers of the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia and India, and the non-nuclear states of Germany, Argentina, Jordan, Indonesia and New Zealand.
In August 2022, an NPT review conference was held in New York, but it ended without a unanimous agreement, as did the previous one in 2015, due to Moscow’s opposition.
Since its invasion Ukraine in February last year, there has been concern that Russia might use nuclear weapons against its former Soviet neighbor in the ongoing conflict.
