Destabilizing Heegaard splittings of knot exteriors

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for Heegaard splittings of knot exteriors to admit destabilizations. As an application, we show the following: let K 1 and K 2 be a pair of knots which is introduced by Morimoto as an example giving degeneration of tunnel number under connected sum. The Heegaard splitting of the exterior of K 1 # K 2 derived from certain minimal unknotting tunnel systems of K 1 and K 2 is stabilized.