TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Nihon Hidankyo, Japan's leading group of atomic bomb survivors and winner of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, said Friday it will send two members to New York for a meeting starting in April to prepare for a major nuclear disarmament conference next year.

The group, also known as the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, will dispatch Hiroshi Kanamoto, 80, and Jiro Hamasumi, 79, to the third meeting of the preparatory committee for the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, with 2025 marking the 80th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.

"If I have the chance to speak, I want to call on the participants to show a path toward abolishing nuclear weapons and to revive the NPT as a meaningful conference," Kanamoto said.

The last two NPT review conferences, held in 2015 and 2022 at the U.N. headquarters, concluded without the issuance of outcome documents due mainly to differences between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states.

Hamasumi, who was in his mother's womb when she was exposed to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, delivered a speech in New York earlier this month at the third meeting of the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into effect in 2021.

Japan, which relies on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for deterrence, is not a state party to the treaty on banning nuclear weapons but is a signatory of the NPT.

The NPT, which came into effect in 1970, recognizes Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States as nuclear weapons states and obliges them to pursue nuclear disarmament.

NPT review conferences are convened every five years, in principle, to discuss the implementation and strengthening of the treaty, which now has 191 parties.