page_title: Battleship
section_title: Cold War
hierarchical_section_title: Battleship / History of battleships / Cold War
caption_attribution_description: English: The U.S. Navy battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) and the aircraft carrier USS Midway (CV-41) surrounded by other ships of Battle Group Alpha while underway in formation in the Indian Ocean, 1 December 1987. The following ships are identifiable: the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61); a Belknap-class guided missile cruiser, probably USS Sterrett (CG-31); the guided missile cruiser USS Ticonderoga (CG-47); probably USS Fox (CG-33); the aircraft carrier USS Midway (CV-41); the fleet oiler USS Cimarron (AO-177); the destroyer USS Deyo (DD-989); the Military Sealift Command fleet oiler USNS Mispillion (T-AO-105); the Knox-class figates USS Knox (FF-1052) and USS Francis Hammond (FF-1067); the combat stores ship USS White Plains (AFS-4); USS Oldendorf (DD-972); the ammunition ship USNS Kilaulea (T-AE-26); the guided missile destroyer USS Towers (DDG-9).
context_page_description: A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of large caliber guns. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the battleship was the most powerful type of warship, and a fleet centered around the battleship was part of the command of the sea doctrine for several decades. By the time of World War II, however, the battleship was made obsolete as other ships, primarily the smaller and faster destroyers, the secretive submarines, and the more versatile aircraft carriers came to be far more useful in naval warfare. While a few battleships were repurposed as fire support ships and as platforms for guided missiles, few countries maintained battleships after World War II, with the last battleships being decommissioned at the end of the Cold War.
  The term battleship came into formal use in the late 1880s to describe a type of ironclad warship, now referred to by historians as pre-dreadnought battleships. In 1906, the commissioning of HMS Dreadnought into the United Kingdom's Royal Navy heralded a revolution in battleship design.
context_section_description: After World War II, several navies retained their existing battleships, but they were no longer strategically dominant military assets. Indeed, it soon became apparent that they were no longer worth the considerable cost of construction and maintenance and only one new battleship was commissioned after the war, HMS Vanguard. During the war it had been demonstrated that battleship-on-battleship engagements like Leyte Gulf or the sinking of HMS Hood were the exception and not the rule, and with the growing role of aircraft engagement ranges were becoming longer and longer, making heavy gun armament irrelevant. The armor of a battleship was equally irrelevant in the face of a nuclear attack as tactical missiles with a range of 100 kilometres (60 mi) or more could be mounted on the Soviet Kildin-class destroyer and Whiskey-class submarines. By the end of the 1950s, smaller vessel classes such as destroyers, which formerly offered no noteworthy opposition to battleships, now were capable of eliminating battleships from outside the range of the ship's heavy guns.
  The remaining battleships met a variety of ends. USS Arkansas and Nagato were sunk during the testing of nuclear weapons in Operation Crossroads in 1946. Both battleships proved resistant to nuclear air burst but vulnerable to underwater nuclear explosions. The Italian battleship Giulio Cesare was taken by the Soviets as reparations and renamed Novorossiysk; she was sunk by a leftover German mine in the Black Sea on October 29, 1955. The two Andrea Doria-class ships were scrapped in 1956. The French Lorraine was scrapped in 1954, Richelieu in 1968, and Jean Bart in 1970.
  The United Kingdom's four surviving King George V-class ships were scrapped in 1957, and Vanguard followed in 1960. All other surviving British battleships had been sold or broken up by 1949. The Soviet Union's Marat was scrapped in 1953, Parizhskaya Kommuna in 1957 and Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya (back under her original name, Gangut, since 1942) in 1956–57. Brazil's Minas Geraes was scrapped in Genoa in 1953, and her sister ship São Paulo sank during a storm in the Atlantic en route to the breakers in Italy in 1951.
  Argentina kept its two Rivadavia-class ships until 1956 and Chile kept Almirante Latorre (formerly HMS Canada) until 1959. The Turkish battlecruiser Yavûz (formerly SMS Goeben, launched in 1911) was scrapped in 1976 after an offer to sell her back to Germany was refused. Sweden had several small coastal-defense battleships, one of which, HSwMS Gustav V, survived until 1970. The Soviets scrapped four large incomplete cruisers in the late 1950s, whilst plans to build a number of new Stalingrad-class battlecruisers were abandoned following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. The three old German battleships Schleswig-Holstein, Schlesien, and Hessen all met similar ends. Hessen was taken over by the Soviet Union and renamed Tsel. She was scrapped in 1960. Schleswig-Holstein was renamed Borodino, and was used as a target ship until 1960. Schlesien, too, was used as a target ship. She was broken up between 1952 and 1957.
  The Iowa-class battleships gained a new lease of life in the U.S. Navy as fire support ships. Radar and computer-controlled gunfire could be aimed with pinpoint accuracy to target. The U.S. recommissioned all four Iowa-class battleships for the Korean War and the New Jersey for the Vietnam War. These were primarily used for shore bombardment, New Jersey firing nearly 6,000 rounds of 16 inch shells and over 14,000 rounds of 5 inch projectiles during her tour on the gunline, seven times more rounds against shore targets in Vietnam than she had fired in the Second World War.
  As part of Navy Secretary John F. Lehman's effort to build a 600-ship Navy in the 1980s, and in response to the commissioning of Kirov by the Soviet Union, the United States recommissioned all four Iowa-class battleships. On several occasions, battleships were support ships in carrier battle groups, or led their own battleship battle group. These were modernized to carry Tomahawk (TLAM) missiles, with New Jersey
caption: US Battleship naval fleet during the Cold War.
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