Media News - Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Japan asked US to reclassify documents on secret nuclear deal

Japan asked the United States in 1999 to reclassify key documents that exposed a secret nuclear weapons agreement that Tokyo continues to deny, a former government official told The Asahi Shimbun. The documents showed that the two countries reached the agreement in 1959 to allow US warships and aircraft carrying nuclear weapons to stop over in Japan or pass through Japanese air space or territorial waters without the required prior consultation with Japan. The US State Department reclassified the documents immediately after the Japanese government's request. In principle, US archives can be disclosed 25 years after they were made. The documents on the secret deal had been declassified for public disclosure by autumn 1999. However, the records of the 1959 talks and other documents concerning the secret deal were reclassified as of Dec. 13, 1999, on grounds they contained classified security information. But a researcher at a private research institute in Washington made a copy of the documents at the US National Archives in November 1999. “I'm in no position to comment on the matter,” Yutaka Kawashima, who was a vice foreign minister in December 1999, told The Asahi Shimbun last month when asked about the secret deal. (Asahi Shimbun)

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