[The Dark]

Originally Posted by RN7

I think the Soviets planned to build two Ulyanovsk Class nuclear powered aircraft carriers before the Cold War ended. How effective they would have been against NATO naval power is I think open to debate. From what we know about the current Russian Kuznetsov carrier it is riddled with engine and other reliability problems and is always accompanied by a deep sea tug because it breaks down so much. The Kuznetsov is also inferior in capabilities to all of the US Navy's fleet of aircraft carriers.

Would a slightly larger nuclear powered Soviet aircraft carrier be any more reliable or capable? I don't think so and I don't think their reliability would be enhanced by the fact that they would be powered by four KN-3 nuclear reactors which were designed for the Kirov Class missile battlecruisers, which would have been a maintenance nightmare and have taken up a lot of internal space. The larger US Navy Nimitz and Ford class carriers have two reactors. Also the Soviet had no experience in steam catapult operations at this time and their naval combat aircraft were not as good as US Navy aircraft.

A large part of the problems with the Kirovs were because the Soviet Navy never built land bases with proper support equipment for the KN-3 reactors, so the reactors had to be shut down in port. This perversely increased wear on components, because the shut-down/start-up cycle was more stressful than running the reactor at minimal levels. If they had a pair of Uylanovsks plus the Kirovs, increasing reactor numbers from 8 to 16, they might build in the necessary support equipment to allow the vessels to run at minimal power in port.

Four reactors sounds problematic, but recall that the Enterprise used eight. The Kirovs were also excessively complicated (in my opinion) due to their odd nuclear-and-oil combination, where the Ulyas would be nuclear-only. The Ulyas would have only slightly more power than a Nimitz (1200 MW to 1100 MW for the pair of A4Ws). Lack of electrical power might actually be an issue, like it is now on the Nimitz-class. The reactors were third-generation (with block cooling systems and improved control rods), but tended to run hot, so cooling would also be an issue, particularly as energy demands rose at high speeds.

Certainly the Soviet fleet was impressive and was more powerful than any European member of NATO. But I don't think they had anything to match a US Navy carrier battle group or an Iowa Class battleship. In wartime if we are talking about the Soviets in the Atlantic and its littoral regions then no Soviet carriers will be going toe to toe with US Navy carrier groups as they will lose. They will also avoid getting to close to NATO dominated coastlines as they will come into contact with NATO land based airpower which is (depending on the individual airforce) superior to Soviet naval aircraft. Also no Soviet warship is going to make it south of NATO's GIUK Gap in the North Atlantic, in fact most Soviet submarines probably wont breech it either.

I'm not sure the Soviets ever planned going toe-to-toe with an American carrier group. The surface fleet was primarily intended to keep enemy carriers out of range of the mainland with the threat of surface-to-surface missiles (at some point, advancing to using helicopters to provide over-the-horizon targeting), while the submarine fleet was a strike arm (ballistic missile subs) and a defensive arm that would be divided between striking at enemy carriers and protecting the boomers (attack subs). Honestly, even the "blue belt" theory espoused in the article doesn't make much sense, since a combination of hunter-killers, land-based aircraft, and missile-armed surface craft should be able to generate the same sort of bubble for boomers to vanish in.

Interesting, the Ulyas are mentioned in a book I have, Norman Polmar's Guide to the Soviet Navy of 1986. The expectation at the time was that the lead ship would be either Sovetskiy Soyuz or Kremlin, that it would use a combined nuclear and steam power plant like Kirov, that it would be complete by 1990, and that it would carry 65-70 fixed-wing aircraft from the Su-27 Flanker, MiG-29 Fulcrum, Su-25 Frogfoot, and possibly Yak-38 Forger families. However, even that would leave the Navy with a large majority of its aircraft being land-based. As of mid-1986, estimates were that the Soviet Navy had 155 carrier-based aircraft and 1,485 land-based aircraft, with 400 strike aircraft, 335 patrol/ASW aircraft, and 750 other aircraft.

I'm less sold on the utility of the Iowas against a Soviet carrier, since the only air defense on the BBs were the four Block 0/Block 1 Phalanx and five Stinger launch positions, since Sea Sparrow couldn't be carried due to the overpressure from the 16" cannon. The Iowa would need assistance from escorts for air defense. The Arleigh Burkes didn't start service until '91, so the best anti-air escorts would be the four dead admirals (the Kidd-class) with a pair of Standard launchers and a pair of Phalanx or the Ticonderogas (5 with the Mark 26 weapon system, 10 or 11 with the Mark 41 in 1990 [Monterey commissioned in June 1990]) with similar armament but with the Aegis radar. The main utility of an Iowa by the 80s will lie in its Tomahawk VLCs, and the Mark 41 Ticonderogas are Tomahawk-capable (but with almost four times as many launch cells as an Iowa has Tomahawk launchers). The composition of their battle groups tacitly acknowledged this, since they always had a Ticonderoga and a Kidd as part of their escort (along with a Spruance and three Perrys for ASW work). The ASW ships do have some anti-air capability, but it's limited.

An interesting what-if would be the pair of "battlecarrier" proposals from the 80s for the Iowas. Martin Marietta suggested replacing the aft turret with hangars and launch/recovery areas for 12 Harriers. Naval Institute Proceedings was more ambitious, and wanted to put an angled flight deck in the rear to operate F/A-18s from. They still wouldn't make the Iowas incredibly useful, but they'd open up the possibility of an Iowa being deployed somewhere that needed the potential for air cover, but didn't justify a full fleet carrier.