The nuclear-powered strike cruiser concept

What might a new US cruiser have looked like if the Cold War had not wound down in the 1980s?

The roughly 13,500-ton nuclear strike-cruiser concept paired a Ticonderoga-style combat system with a Long Beach-like hull, an eight-inch gun, and a much larger missile battery.

The proposed strike cruiser combined nuclear endurance, an eight-inch gun, and substantially more vertical-launch capacity than a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. Describing it as a Ticonderoga on a Long Beach hull conveys both the scale and the intended concentration of combat power. The exact cell count remains uncertain in the discussion. Even so, the proposal carried the cruiser tradition of independent reach and unusually heavy armament into the missile age.