The commission seeks to reduce the risks of nuclear war by promoting disarmament and combating the spread of atomic weapons, notably in advance of a United Nations treaty review due in May next year.

The two countries set up the commission in July 2008, saying it would investigate states which have ratified the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and are suspected of violating it, and states which have not signed the UN treaty.

Iran, which western countries suspect of seeking atomic weapons, has ratified the treaty. North Korea, which has admitted possessing them, signed it but then withdrew in 2003.

Israel, which is widely believed to possess atomic arms, has not signed the treaty; neither have nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, which possess them officially.

Australia has the world's biggest known reserves of uranium, the main raw material for nuclear weapons.

Japan is the only country in the world to have had nuclear weapons used against it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed by the United States in August 1945, in one of the final acts of World War II.

The ICNND is jointly chaired by two former foreign ministers: Gareth Evans of Australia and Yoriko Kawaguchi of Japan. It also includes former US defense secretary William Perry and former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, now a UN special envoy.

An Egyptian official told AFP in Cairo that a former Israeli foreign minister, Schlomo Ben Ami, talked to Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, at an ICNND meeting held in Cairo at the end of September.

The ICNND is working to prepare the next five-yearly review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which will be held in May next year in New York.

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