Why late-war cruisers were not designed for missiles

Were late-war gun cruisers built with future missile conversion in mind?

No. Designers knew primitive missiles existed, but could not foresee the systems that emerged after the war, and treasuries would not fund speculative conversion margin for an undefined weapon.

V-2s and other early missiles did not give naval architects a useful picture of postwar surface-to-air or surface-to-surface systems. A designer asking for extra displacement and volume for an unknown future conversion would have been laughed out of the room by treasury officials. Some large cruisers later proved adaptable, but their success came from generous hulls and available space rather than a clear wartime missile plan.