Question: What was the purpose of the shipbuilding program mandated by Second Vinson Act?
About the article "Battle of Midway", section "Impact".

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The Naval Act of 1938, known as the Second Vinson Act, was United States legislation enacted on May 17, 1938, that "mandated a 20% increase in strength of the United States Navy".
It represented the United States' response to the Japanese invasion of China and the German annexation of Austria.
The act was sponsored by Carl Vinson, a Democratic Congressman from Georgia who was Chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee.
It updated the provisions of the Vinson-Trammell Act ("First Vinson Act") of 1934 and the Naval Act of 1936, which had "authorized the construction of the first American battleships in 17 years", based on the provisions of the London Naval Treaty of 1930.
It was followed by the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940. 
A member of the United States House of Representatives for fifty years, Carl Vinson was, for twenty-nine years, the Chairman of the House Naval Affairs and Armed Services Committee; Vinson was the principal sponsor of the so-called "Vinson Acts," culminating in the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940, which provided for the massive Naval shipbuilding effort in World War II. 
Vinson served as a Representative from November 3, 1914, to January 3, 1965.
During his tenure in the U.S. House, Vinson was a champion for national defense and especially the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps.
He joined the House Naval Affairs Committee shortly after World War I and became the ranking Democratic member in the early 1920s.
He was the only Democrat appointed to the Morrow Board, which reviewed the status of aviation in America in the mid-1920s.
In 1931, Vinson became chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee.
In 1934, he helped push the Vinson-Trammell Act, along with Senator Park Trammell of Florida.
The bill authorized the replacement of obsolete vessels by new construction and a gradual increase of ships within the limits of the Washington Naval Treaty, 1922 and London Naval Treaty, 1930.
Initial funding for the Vinson-Trammell Navy Act was provided by the Emergency Appropriations Act of 1934.
This was necessary as during the previous administration, not a single major warship was laid down and the US Navy was both aging and losing ground to the Japanese Navy, which would repudiate the Treaties in late 1934.
He later was primarily responsible for additional naval expansion legislation, the Naval Act of 1938 ("Second Vinson Act") and the Third Vinson Act of 1940, as well as the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940.
The ambitious program called for by this series of laws helped the U.S. Navy as the country entered World War II, as new ships were able to match the latest ships from Japan.
At the end of the war, Congress had authorized four Naval four-star officers to be promoted to Fleet Admiral.
A staunch partisan of Admiral William Halsey, Jr., Vinson blocked the nomination of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, thought to be more deserving by the majority, multiple times to ensure that Halsey got the fourth billet.
Congress eventually responded by passing an unprecedented act which specified that Spruance would remain on a full admiral's pay once retired until death.
A staunch segregationist, in 1956, Vinson signed "The Southern Manifesto".
Vinson did not seek re-election in 1964 and retired from Congress in January 1965.
He returned to Baldwin County, Georgia, where he lived in retirement until his death.
He is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville, Georgia. 
Work on what would eventually become the "Iowa"-class battleships began on the first study in early 1938 at the direction of Admiral Thomas C. Hart, head of the General Board.
It was an expanded "South Dakota", carrying either twelve 16-inch/45 caliber Mark 6 guns or nine 18-inch (460 mm) guns—the latter armament being dropped after the 31 March agreement—with more armor and a power plant large enough to drive the larger ship through the water at the same speed as the "South Dakota"s, .
These studies had no further impact on the design of the "Iowa" class, but development of this design continued and eventually evolved into the design for the .
Another design, pursued by the Design Division section of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, was a "cruiser-killer."
Beginning on 17 January 1938 under Captain A.J.
Chantry, the group drew up plans for ships with twelve 16-inch and twenty 5-inch guns, Panamax capability but otherwise unlimited displacement, a top speed of and a range of when traveling at the more economical speed of .
Their plan fulfilled these requirements with a ship of , but Chantry believed that more could be done if the ship were to be this large; with a displacement greater than that of most battleships, its armor would only have protected it against the 8-inch (203 mm) weapons carried by heavy cruisers.
Three improved plans—"A", "B", and "C"—were designed at the end of January.
An increase in draft, vast additions to the armor, and the substitution of twelve guns in the secondary battery was common between the three designs.
"A" was the largest, at , and was the only one to still carry the twelve 16-inch guns in four triple turrets.
It required 277,000 shaft horsepower (shp) to make .
"B" was the smallest at ; like "A" it had a top speed of 32.5 knots, but "B" only required 225,000 shp to make this speed.
It also carried only nine 16-inch guns, in three triple turrets.
"C" was similar but it added 75,000 shp (for a total of 300,000 shp), to make the original requirement of 35 knots.
The weight required for this and a longer belt—, compared with for "B"—meant that the ship was .
In March 1938, the General Board followed the recommendations of the Battleship Design Advisory Board, which was composed of the naval architect William Francis Gibbs, William Hovgaard (then president of New York Shipbuilding), John Metten, Joseph W. Powell, and the long-retired Admiral and former Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance Joseph Strauss.
The board requested an entirely new design study, focusing on increasing the size of the 35,000 ton "South Dakota" class.
The first plans made for this indicated that was possible on a displacement of about .
could be bought with 220,000 shaft horsepower and a displacement of around , which was well below the Second London Naval Treaty's maximum limit of .
These designs were able to convince the General Board that a reasonably well-designed and balanced battleship was possible within the terms of the "escalator clause".
However, further studies revealed major problems with the estimates.
The speed of the ships meant that more freeboard would be needed both fore and amidships, the latter requiring an additional foot of "armored" freeboard.
Along with this came the associated weight in supporting these new strains: the structure of the ship had to be reinforced and the power plant enlarged to avoid a drop in speed.
In all, about had to be added, and the large margin the navy designers had previously thought they had—roughly —was suddenly vanishing.
With the additional displacement, the General Board was incredulous that a tonnage increase of would only allow the addition of s over the "South Dakota"s. Rather than retaining the 16"/45 caliber Mark 6 gun used in the "South Dakota"s, they ordered that future studies would have to include the more powerful (but heavier) 16"/50 caliber Mark 2 guns left over from the canceled s and battleships of the early 1920s.
It also allowed the draft of the ships to be increased, meaning that the ships could be shortened (lowering weight) and the power reduced (since a narrower beam reduces drag).
The 50-caliber gun weighed some more than the 45 caliber did; the barbette size also had to be increased so the total weight gain was about , putting the ship at a total of —well over the 45,000 long ton limit.
An apparent savior appeared in a Bureau of Ordnance preliminary design for a turret that could carry the 50 caliber guns in a smaller barbette.
This breakthrough was shown to the General Board as part of a series of designs on 2 June 1938.
However, the Bureau of Ordnance continued working on a larger barbette design, while the Bureau of Construction and Repair utilized the smaller barbettes in the final planning of the new battleships.
As the bureaus were independent of one another, they did not realize that the two plans could not go together until November 1938, when the design was in the final stages of refinement.
By this time, the ships could not use the larger barbette, as it would require massive alterations to the design and would result in substantial weight penalties.
The General Board was astounded; one member asked the head of the Bureau of Ordnance if it had occurred to him that Construction and Repair would have wanted to know what turret his subordinates were working on "as a matter of common sense".
A complete scrapping of plans was only avoided when designers within the Bureau of Ordnance were able to design a new 50-caliber gun, the Mark 7, that was both lighter and smaller in outside diameter; this allowed it to be placed in a turret that would fit in the smaller barbette.
The redesigned 3-gun turret, equipped as it was with the Mark 7 naval gun, provided an overall weight saving of nearly to the overall design of the "Iowa" class.
In May 1938 the United States Congress passed the Second Vinson Act which "mandated a 20% increase in strength of the United States Navy".
The act was sponsored by Carl Vinson, a Democratic Congressman from Georgia who was Chairman of the House Naval Affairs and Armed Services Committee.
The Second Vinson Act updated the provisions of the Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934 and the Naval Act (1936), which had "authorized the construction of the first American battleships in 17 years", based on the provisions of the London Naval Treaty of 1930; this act provided the funding to build the "Iowa" class.
Each ship cost approximately US$100 million.
As 1938 drew to a close the design of the "Iowa"s was nearly complete, but it would continuously evolve as the battleships were under construction.
These revisions included changing the design of the foremast, replacing the original 1.1"/75-caliber guns that were to be used for anti-aircraft work with 20 mm and 40 mm guns, and moving the combat information center into the armored hull.
Additionally, in November 1939 the New York Navy Yard greatly modified the internal subdivision of the machinery rooms, as tests had shown the underwater protection in these rooms to be inadequate.
The result of this was clearly beneficial: "The prospective effect of flooding was roughly halved and the number of uptakes and hence of openings in the third deck greatly reduced."
Although the changes meant extra weight and added to the beam, this was no longer a major issue; the United Kingdom and France had renounced the Second London Naval Treaty soon after the beginning of the Second World War. 
Born in Cadiz, Kentucky, Vinson attended the United States Naval Academy and graduated in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in engineering.
He served at Naval Air Station Pensacola as a naval aviator from 1962–1968, attaining the rank of lieutenant.
After his service, he attended Vanderbilt University and received his J.D.
in 1971.
Returning to Pensacola, Florida, Vinson joined the law firm of Beggs & Lane, where he practiced general civil law from 1971–1983.
He was nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan on September 9, 1983 to a seat vacated by Lynn C. Higby, was confirmed by the Senate on October 4, and received his commission a day later.
Among the notable cases he has presided over: Four defendants of abortion clinic bombing, 1985 Escambia County, Florida ordinance banning "The Last Temptation of Christ", 1988 Shoney's $134 million race discrimination settlement, 1993 Paul Jennings Hill (federal Clinic Access Law charges), 1994 Sentenced Financial Manager Marcus Schrenker, who attempted to fake his own death by parachuting out of his plane after charges were brought against him for securities fraud, to four years in federal prison in 2009.
Vinson was chief judge from 1997 to 2004.
He assumed senior status on March 31, 2005.
He is noted for being a hardline judge who refuses to depart from maximum sentences in spite of their severity, even though he agrees his very own sentences are far too high.
In his own words: “The punishment is supposed to fit the crime, but when a legislative body says this is going to be the sentence no matter what other factors there are, that’s draconian in every sense of the word.
Mandatory sentences breed injustice.”He was appointed to serve a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, effective May 4, 2006.
As a member of the FISA court, Vinson issued a top secret court order on April 25, 2013 requiring Verizon's Business Network Services to provide metadata on all calls in its system to the National Security Agency “on an ongoing daily basis”.
In 2010, Vinson was assigned to hear a case, "Florida et al v. United States Department of Health and Human Services", brought by a group of 26 states that was filed with support by 22 attorneys general and four governors challenging the constitutionality of the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), specifically its requirement that most individuals obtain medical insurance.
The suit is the second of more than 15 lawsuits filed against the act that has advanced to this stage of litigation.
On January 31, 2011, Vinson ruled that the individual mandate provision of the PPACA violated the Constitution by regulating economic inactivity, and as the mandate is not severable the entire statute was ruled unconstitutional.
Vinson allowed the law to stand while it was being appealed by the Obama administration.
Vinson later issued a stay to his January ruling, allowing implementation to proceed while its constitutionality was weighed.