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Coming to a Sea Near You: Giant Russian Nuke Cruiser

Alright, alright, we get it: Russia is big and scary, and spending lots of money to build new weapons to re-conquer the Caucasus and maybe even Eastern Europe. In reality, many of those reports are all hype: Russia’s military must leap huge hurdles — financial, industrial, technical and professional — before it will ever be […]

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Alright, alright, we get it: Russia is big and scary, and spending lots of money to build new weapons to re-conquer the Caucasus and maybe even Eastern Europe.

In reality, many of those reports are all hype: Russia's military must leap huge hurdles -- financial, industrial, technical and professional -- before it will ever be more than a regional, mostly defensive force with limited ability to strike its neighbors.

The latest hype? That the Russian Navy is rebuilding one of its awesome, Cold War sea dinosaurs: a 25,000-ton nuclear-powered battlecruiser sporting more than a hundred anti-air and anti-ship missiles. Only five Kirovs were built before Russia's economic meltdown in the early 1990s. Four were scrapped or mothballed, leaving just one ship -- of dubious reliability -- in service with the Northern Fleet. That ship, Peter the Great, is headed to Venezuela for an exercise.

Now Russia is promising to rebuild another Kirov, the Admiral Nakhimov -- a ship that has spent most of the last 20 years tied to a pier -- and put her back into service in 2010, perhaps as Pacific Fleet flagship, according to Galrahn.

But one commenter on Galrahn's excellent blog is skeptical:

Having participated in one carrier overhaul (conventional) and having watched a couple of nuke overhauls out of the corner of my eye, I'm confident they can't replace the reactor and have this ship back in service in 2010. Betcha the Nakhimov doesn't go back to sea before
2016 at the earliest. And, given the number and nature of the other major systems being replaced, I bet this ship gets scrapped AFTER the
Russians sink a heckuva lot of money into it. No way can they make this upgrade work. Especially in the time allotted.

"Bill" has a point. Consider that Russia is three years late modernizing an old aircraft carrier for India.

You think U.S. naval shipbuilding has problems. In the last 15 years, Russia has completed just one new, large warship, the Admiral Chabanenko -- a vessel roughly equivalent to a U.S. Burke-class destroyer. We've built around 40 Burkes in the same time period.

(Photo: via Defence Talk)

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