near El Centro, California, and then flew back across the country to land at NAS Patuxent River in Maryland. A more suitable aircraft, the North American AJ Savage, was under development. Forrestal considered the notion of a single service having a monopoly on nuclear weapons to be misguided. He convened a conference at Key West from 11 to 14 March 1948 that was attended by the JCS and one deputy each to discuss the roles of the different services. The resulting Key West Agreement assigned primary responsibility for strategic bombing to the Air Force, but the Navy was not prohibited from participating. Navy leadership doubted that wars could be won by strategic bombing alone, and some naval officers had a moral objection to relying upon the widespread use of nuclear weapons to destroy the major population centers. Most felt that atomic bombs were best used against targets like submarine pens and logistical hubs rather than cities and industrial facilities. The Gallery memorandum led some senior leaders in the Air Force to fear that the Navy wanted to take over the strategic bombing mission, but the real agenda for naval aviators was to justify their own existence. Cancellation of USS United States Since 1945, the Navy had been working on the design of a new class of aircraft carrier. Its principal proponent was Admiral Marc Mitscher, Radford's predecessor as the DCNO for Air and the skipper of the during the 1942 Doolittle Raid, when USAAF North American B-25 Mitchell bombers were launched from that aircraft carrier. Mitscher proposed the construction of an aircraft carrier that would have been ideal for that mission. He wanted a flush deck so that it could operate 16 to 24 large bombers weighing up to , and carry enough fuel and bombs for 100 sorties to be flown without rearming or refueling. Another advantage of the flush deck was highlighted by the 1946 Operation Crossroads nuclear tests: it was less susceptible to the shock waves produced by a nearby nuclear explosion. The flush deck carrier was given the designation Project 6A. Since the bombers would be too large to fit in a hangar, Mitscher suggested that it be dispensed with, but the designers added a one so it could also carry 80 McDonnell F2H Banshee jet fighters. They calculated that 24 Douglas A3D Skywarrior bombers would require a flight deck long and wide; this was reduced