US Navy Plans to Sink America

The United States Navy is planning on taking the aircraft carrier USS America 300 miles off the eastern coast of the United States to sink it in international waters on April 11, 2005.
The navy will attack the aircraft carrier to see how many weapons it will take to sink it. They already know it will cost about 20 million dollars.
The aircraft carrier displaces over 82,200 tons. The total tonnage of steel and specialty metals on the ship are worth well over 70 million dollars - especially in today’s constricted steel market.
The US Navy will spend more than 100 million dollars to sink a ship which cost more than 400 million dollars to build.
This particular ship wasn’t put together very well in the first place.
The ship never went through the Navy's Carrier Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) and was falling apart before it was mothballed in Philadelphia. In the early 1990s one of the flight deck elevators fell with S-3B aircraft and several sailors on it.
The ship also experienced steam and fuel leaks. Also in the early 1990s while returning from a cruise - the captain took a shortcut though a hurricane which destroyed most of the flight deck catwalks.
Our national steel industry is in dire straits. Expenditures on weapons continue to spiral up.
The sinking of the USS America at a cost of 20 million dollars and a total loss to the United States Treasury of more than 100 million dollars is being done against recommendations that include having the ship broken up in an American port in order to salvage the steel.
Facilities for this sort of work exist in all of the states on the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The decision to sink the ship in international waters has been condemned as an act of negligence on the part of the United States.
In 2001 Polio National Immunization Days were instituted in rural areas in Africa and Asia. During the course of that work over 27 million children were immunized against polio at a cost of 60 cents per immunized child.
The money saved by not attacking the ship (20 million) could immunize 33,333,333.33 children.
The potential income by selling the ship for scrap (50 to 70 million dollars) could immunize between 83 million and 116 million children.
The USS Oriskany is due to be sunk off the coast of Florida as an artificial reef to attract fish. Globally 40,000 children under the age of five die each day from malnutrition and vaccine preventable disease.