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Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is planning to break with tradition and attend the review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) planned for August at U.N. headquarters in New York.

The review conference is held once every five years and normally Cabinet ministers, not the head of the government, attends.

The novel coronavirus pandemic has led to four postponements of the NPT review conference, which was initially to have been held in 2020.

Kishida felt there was a need to personally attend in light of the threat by Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons should the West intervene in the invasion of Ukraine, according to several government sources.

Because Kishida represents a Lower House district that covers central Hiroshima city, he has long worked toward creating a world without nuclear weapons. He attended the 2015 review conference when he was foreign minister.

Article 6 of the NPT calls on nuclear powers to engage in sincere nuclear disarmament talks, but with Russia threatening to use nuclear weapons rather than enter into such negotiations, concerns are being raised that the NPT, itself, is in danger of collapsing.

Kishida wants to attend the review conference as the leader of the only nation to have had atomic bombs dropped on it during war and serve as a bridge between the nuclear and non-nuclear states, sources said.

With the plan to hold next year’s Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Kishida also wants to push forward discussions on nuclear disarmament.

Kishida had hinted he might attend the NPT review conference in his keynote address given on June 10 at the Asia Security Summit, also known as the Shangri-la Dialogue, held in Singapore.

Saying the course for bringing about a world without nuclear weapons had become much more difficult, Kishida pledged to make every effort to ensure significant results regarding strengthening the NPT at the review conference.

Survivors of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and Hiroshima city officials, had called on the government to attend, as an observer, the first conference of nations that have signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The conference is scheduled for Vienna in late June.

Kishida does not plan to attend that conference, however, on the grounds it will not include the nuclear powers, making the treaty ineffective.

Japan has not signed the TPNW because the nation is protected under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

Plans are also being pushed forward to have Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi attend the meeting of foreign ministers of nations belonging to the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative scheduled for New York just prior to the NPT review conference.

caption: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida meets with officers of the Junior Chamber International Japan on June 14. (Koichi Ueda)

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