Death on A Dreadnought

By Jacob V. Lamar

The battleship Iowa is believed to have made it through World War II and the Korean War without a single officer or crew member being killed in combat. But last week, in one of the worst accidents in recent U.S. military history, an explosion in the second gun turret of the 46-year-old vessel took the lives of 47 young sailors. At week's end investigators were still trying to determine the cause of the blast as the Iowa steamed toward its home port of Norfolk, Va. Defective electrical wiring, a damaged firing mechanism in the ship's gun system or even an errant spark may have been at fault. The tragedy ignited a new debate over the usefulness of the old dreadnoughts in the nuclear age.

The Iowa and three similar warships were built during World War II and designed to withstand shelling from Japan's battleships. The Iowa was fitted with nine 16-in. guns capable of propelling shells weighing as much as 2,700 lbs. a distance of 23 miles. Three six-story turrets holding the guns were encased in armor up to 17 1/2 in. thick. When last week's explosion occurred during training exercises about 330 miles off Puerto Rico, that protective armor turned the turret into a tightly sealed pressure cooker.

After the Korean War, the Iowa-class battleships were mothballed. But John Lehman, Ronald Reagan's first Navy Secretary, wanted to bring back the behemoths -- weighing in at 58,000 tons when fully loaded -- in his quest for a 600-ship Navy. Military reformers argued that battleships were obsolete, the products of a technology that has gone essentially unchanged for 50 years. The Navy proposed to modernize the vessels by replacing one of their three gun turrets with cruise-missile launch batteries. That plan was later discarded.

In 1983 Reagan sent the U.S.S. New Jersey to Lebanon, where it fired shells at Syrian and Druze positions with a high rate of inaccuracy. While many military experts argued that battleships simply provide an empty show of force, defenders of the dreadnoughts responded that in some situations they are invaluable in projecting a nation's power and determination. "In peacetime the mission is political presence," says naval analyst Norman Polmar, "and they are very impressive for that." But they are also quite expensive. While cheaper to operate than an aircraft carrier, each of the four active battleships consumes $80 million a year in operations and support costs.

Moreover, battleships lack antisubmarine and antiaircraft capability. While there is no way to modernize the 16-in. guns with safer automatic loaders, battleships could be converted to cruise-missile platforms, reducing the number of crew members and retiring the old-fashioned bagged-powder firing system. Refitting the ships with 320 Tomahawk cruise missiles apiece, as the Navy once proposed, would cost more than $1 billion a vessel, an unlikely expenditure at a time of shrinking Pentagon budgets. But if the damage to the Iowa is beyond repair, the Navy may have no choice but to replace the burned- out turret with a cruise-missile loader -- or retire the old battlewagon once and for all.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington