Come Aboard the 'Battlecarrier': The Navy's Dream of Merging a Battleship and an Aircraft Carrier
Kyle Mizokami [2]
The resulting ship, a “battlecarrier,†was merely one of many schemes over the span of 30 years to modernize the most powerful American battleships ever built. The various proposals—all of them nixed—had the World War II-era ships carrying hundreds of U.S. Marines or launching Harrier jump jets or even firing atomic projectiles.
In the early 1980s, four Iowa-class fast battleships [3] originally built during World War II—Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey and Wisconsin—were taken out of mothballs and returned to active duty.
Nearly 900 feet long and displacing close to 60,000 tons, the battlewagons could fire a nine-gun broadside sending 18 tons of steel and explosives hurtling towards their targets.
http://nationalinterest.org/print/blog/the-buzz/come-aboard-the-battlecarrier-the-navys-dream-merging-25930
