Project 24 battleships and Stalingrad battlecruisers

The book reading surveys Project 24 battleship variants, smaller monitor-like studies, and the evolution of Project 82 into the Stalingrad class. Project 24 reached studies of roughly 73,000 tons, while alternative proposals tried to concentrate very heavy guns in much smaller monitor-like hulls. Stalin instead pressed for the fast, 305 mm Project 82 battlecruisers, accelerating construction of Stalingrad and two sister ships. His death brought cancellation under Khrushchev, leaving one hull for weapons tests and the others to be broken up on the slips. Completed Soviet battlecruisers might have encouraged a Soviet carrier program and changed the force-planning problem faced by Britain and the United States.