- NEWPORT NEWS, Va.
- The retired aircraft carrier USS America is on the bottom of the Atlantic
Ocean, sunk by the Navy in a series of explosive tests that upset some
veterans.
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- The 84,000-ton, 1,048-foot warship that served the Navy
for 32 years rests about 60 miles off the coast and more than 6,000 feet
down, according to Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command.
-
- She did not give a location, but the Navy previously
said the explosions would take place off North Carolina.
-
- Dolan said the America went down May 14, finally flooded
after the series of explosions over 25 days. No announcement was made at
the time.
-
- Dolan did not immediately return a telephone message
left Friday by The Associated Press.
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- No warship this size or larger had ever been sunk, and
plans to sink the America caused controversy.
-
- "Not a day goes by that I don't think about it,"
said Lee McNulty, president of the USS America Foundation, which wanted
to turn the ship into a museum. "Of all the carriers, that one should
have been saved, just for the name America."
-
- The America launched warplanes during the Vietnam War,
the 1986 conflict with Libya, the first Gulf War, and over Bosnia-Herzegovina
in the mid-1990s.
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- The Navy said in March that the explosive tests would
provide valuable data on survivability for the next generation of aircraft
carriers, which are now in development.
-
- Since its decommissioning in 1996, the America had been
moored with dozens of other inactive warships at a Navy yard in Philadelphia.
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