Kishida to attend NPT meeting

April 8, 2015

Foreign minister to deliver anti-nuclear arms message at U.N. NPT conference

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20150408p2a00m0na018000c.html

Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said he is eager to carry the anti-nuclear weapons message from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a United Nations conference scheduled to start in New York on April 27.

During an April 7 interview -- ahead of the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) -- Kishida told the Mainichi Shimbun and other news media that he is to make a speech on the first day of the conference.

"I will embed messages from Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the speech to carry realistic and practical strategies for a world without nuclear weapons forward," Kishida commented. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both devastated by U.S. atomic bombs in August 1945.

Kishida, a House of Representatives member elected from a Hiroshima Prefecture constituency, is the first Japanese foreign minister in 10 years to attend an NPT meeting.

In March this year, the Japanese government presented a plan for an agreement on nuclear non-proliferation to the U.N. The plan had been worked out by the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI) formed by 12 member countries, including Japan, that do not possess nuclear arms.

The NPDI proposed in the plan to request multi-party arms reduction negotiations among nuclear powers, as well as transparency over the size of their weapons stockpiles. The plan further requests all of the countries that have ratified the NPT to take concrete actions toward nuclear arms reductions and non-proliferation.

Kishida told interviewers that Japan has received positive feedback from many nations, adding that the country will push harder to include the plan as the pillar of the NPT conference final agreement.

Asked about a move among non-nuclear powers, such as Austria, to demand that negotiations be initiated on a convention banning nuclear weapons, Kishida said, "It may appear as a detour, but I believe taking realistic approaches will eventually lead to a shortcut (to nuclear disarmament)."

April 08, 2015(Mainichi Japan)