Japan urges "collaboration" on nuke disarmament toward 2026 confab (2025)

Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya on Monday called for "dialogue and collaboration" to advance nuclear disarmament toward a key U.N. conference next year, highlighting efforts by an atomic bomb survivors' group that received the Nobel Peace Prize for conveying the horrors of the destructive weapons.

"The cry that the tragedies of nuclear weapons must never be repeated and the call for achieving a 'world without nuclear weapons' are now louder than ever," Iwaya said in a speech in New York at a preparatory committee meeting for the 2026 review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

"The NPT architecture must respond to those earnest wishes of people around the world," Iwaya said, calling on all members of the NPT to "cherish and exercise the spirit of dialogue and collaboration" toward the nuclear disarmament meeting.

Amid deep division between nuclear haves and have-nots, the NPT review conference has failed to adopt a final document for two straight meetings. The previous gathering in 2022 flopped due to opposition from Russia.

The current preparatory committee meeting marks the third time since 2018 that a Japanese foreign minister has attended ahead of an NPT review conference, which is held every five years in principle.

Iwaya's attendance is aimed at showing that the Japanese government is pushing for efforts to promote nuclear disarmament, after facing criticism from atomic bomb survivors for not attending as an observer a convention of signatories to a U.N. nuclear weapons ban treaty held in New York in March this year.

As the only country to have suffered nuclear attacks in war, the Japanese government has aspired for a world free of nuclear weapons. But it has called for pursuing "realistic" efforts toward that end by maintaining the NPT regime, with Japan also relying on the nuclear deterrence provided by the United States.

In his speech, Iwaya touched on Nihon Hidankyo, Japan's leading group of atomic bomb survivors and winner of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, and the survivors' efforts to raise "awareness of the devastation caused by nuclear weapons" despite their deep emotional and psychological wounds and scars.

Iwaya said the NPT regime is facing "difficulties," pointing to North Korea's nuclear and missile development program and the "rapid buildup of nuclear capabilities in an opaque manner," apparently with China in mind.

"Our predecessors created the NPT as a framework of international cooperation to never repeat the devastation and sacrifices of the past war," the foreign minister said. "We must, at all costs, maintain and strengthen this framework."

"Japan will make its utmost effort to maintain the NPT and improve its functioning," he added.

Under the NPT, which entered into force in 1970, nuclear powers pledge to work toward disarmament in exchange for the promise that non-nuclear nations will not acquire them, while all countries have access to nuclear energy for peaceful purpose.

The NPT recognizes five countries -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- that developed and detonated nuclear weapons prior to Jan. 1, 1967, as nuclear-weapon states.

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