b'The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 was an ill-advised attempt by the World WarA bold line separates pre- and post-war military history, and that line is boldest in I Allied powers to limit the proliferation of weapons of war by prohibiting the con- the areas of aviation and nuclear technology. The conversion from propeller power struction of heavy battleships. Consequently, the USS Lexington, which was original- to jet power for fighter/attack aircraft was immediate and universal for the Navy, and ly designed as a battle-cruiser, was converted into the countrys second aircraft car- both the conversion of existing aircraft carriers and the development of new ones for rier, commissioned as CV-2 in 1928. Its sister ship, the USS Saratoga (CV-3), joinedjetswhich included innovations like steam-powered catapults to launch the heavi-the Lady Lex as cornerstones of the U.S. Navys Pacific Fleet. In what would proveer, slower-to-accelerate planes, and higher-powered arresting systems for landingto be one of the costliest military miscalculations of the 20th Century, when the Jap- would exponentially expand the lethality of U.S. Navy carrier battle groups, and their anese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, both the Lexington and Saratogaeffectiveness as a deterrent to prospective enemies.were at sea, and not in their homeport, where both might have been destroyed in theThe use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, which finally ended attack, along with the planes in their squadrons. For sake of clarity, the USS LexingtonWorld War II, changed all military calculations for every powerful nation on earth, (CV-16) that serves as a museum on Corpus Christi Bay was the heroic replacementforevermore. While the development, testing and deployment of nuclear weapons of the original CV-2, which was destroyed in the Battle of the Coral Sea, in May 1942. was put into the hands of the newly-formed U.S. Air Force, under a strategy cen-TheCoastalBend.com THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE105'