A Symbol of Russian Naval Power: The Kirov-Class Battlecruiser

The United States Navy is the largest and most powerful navy in the world. It has 274 deployable combat vessels. So you would think there's no other rival warship that can cause them concern, right? Wrong! The largest and heaviest surface combatant warship (meaning not an aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship) is Russian: the Kirov–class Battlecruiser.

Project 1144 or Sea Eagle is the official name for this warship class but its also called Kirov after the name of the first battlecruiser to be built in the late 1930s. It was first built during the late 1970s. In 1992 it was renamed as the Admiral Ushakov.

Though they are not battlecruisers in the real sense but are just heavy nuclear–powered missile cruisers. However, they're called battlecruisers because they look just like battlecruisers of the First World War. There were supposed to be 5 ships built, but one was cancelled because of lack of funds. The Pyotr Velkiy is the only of her kind in active service. But the Russian Navy plans to use another one, the Admiral Nakhimov, again in 2018. It wanted to activate the remaining other two but their nuclear reactors are in poor and unsafe condition, according to recent reports.

The United States Navy was alarmed when the Soviets launched the Kirov Class in the 1980s. After all, it was the height of the Cold War, and there's a possibility that the U.S.A and Russia might have gone to war with each other. So the American Navy re-activated their own big battleships, the Iowa Class. These old warships had been used before during the Second World War to defend their aircraft carriers against the Imperial Japanese Navy. Fortunately, the Iowa and Kirov classes have never battled each other, but imagine if they had!

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirov-class_battlecruiser
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/kirov-class-battle-cruiser-the-worlds-largest-surface-1570998551

Thanks to ArmedForcesUpdate for the Youtube video

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