Nuclear strike cruisers as carrier escorts

The unbuilt strike cruisers were intended to escort nuclear-powered carriers. Their absence is criticised as a failure to provide an escort capability considered necessary for those carriers, despite American manufacturing capacity in the 1970s and 1980s. An automatic 8-inch gun is singled out among the project's technologies. The criticism extends to the lost opportunity to combine those weapons with nuclear surface propulsion. A pair of comparable ships is also proposed as something the Royal Navy could have used.