NHK has learned that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will attend the peace memorial ceremony in Hiroshima City, western Japan, on August 6 this year to mark the US atomic bombing of the city in 1945.

Informed sources say he is now working out the details of his visit with Hiroshima City officials. This will be his first attendance at the Hiroshima ceremony.

He hoped to attend the annual ceremony in 2020, but the plan was scrapped due to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2018, he attended a memorial ceremony in Nagasaki, another city devastated by an atomic bomb three days after Hiroshima.

It has been 12 years since his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, became the first UN secretary-general to attend the Hiroshima ceremony in 2010.

It is believed that Guterres is hoping to use his visit to Hiroshima as an opportunity to send a strong anti-nuclear message to the world, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine heightens the risk of a nuclear war.

Guterres may also be hoping that his visit to Hiroshima could help boost momentum toward nuclear abolishment during a review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in August.

The first NPT conference in 7 years is scheduled to start on August 1 at the UN headquarters in New York.