Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Monday announced creation of the Nuclear Nonproliferations and Disarmament Commission during his visit to Japan after laying a wreath in Hiroshima, the site of first atomic bombings in 1945.

The commission, which will be co-chaired by former foreign minister Gareth Evans, will examine the work of two similar earlier panels — the Australian-led Canberra Commission and Japan’s Tokyo Forum — to develop a plan of action for the next (NPT) review conference in 2010. The first task of the panel will be to report to a major international conference of experts in Australia late next year.

“Australia has the largest known uranium reserves in the world. We can, therefore, understand the different concerns that different countries bring to this debate,” he said, denying that the plan was a way to allow Australia to sell uranium to India, which is not a signatory to the NPT.

Rudd said he understood the Indian arguments, and said the US administration had also put India’s case to him, but the Labor Party was firmly behind the NPT. India would not be able to circumvent the NPT by joining the commission as “the commission that I’m proposing is a non-government body,” he was quoted as saying by The Australian.

Japan, the only country to have come under nuclear attack, will be asked to take part, as will other nations, Rudd told students at Kyoto University. “Across the world today, we have some 10,000 nuclear warheads currently in operation and some 20,000 in storage many, and probably most, of greater capacity than that bomb which took out Hiroshima all those years ago,” Rudd said.

Rudd said the NPT was under great pressure with some countries developing nuclear weapons outside its framework and others like North Korea defying the international community and leaving the treaty altogether.

“There are two courses of action available to the community of nations to allow the NPT to continue to fragment, or to exert every global effort to restore and defend the treaty,” he said.