Dear Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama,
In the fall of 1980 I was assigned as a civilian university professor to provide Japanese language instruction to the officers and men of the USS Knox (FF-1052), a destroyer home-ported in Yokosuka. Sharing quarters with the ship's nuclear weapons officer, I soon became aware that the Knox was outfitted with an ASROC antisubmarine missile system including nuclear depth bombs.
I say this because: 1) The operations manual for these nuclear weapons lay in plain sight on the floor beneath the officer's desk; 2) receipts for the nuclear weapons first loaded on the ship in Guam were on his desk; and 3) an armed marine stood guard 24 hours a day in front of a door on the ship marked with a radiation hazard sign.