title: Richard Simmons

text: Upon moving to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Simmons worked as the "maître d'hôtel "at Derek's, a restaurant in Beverly Hills. He developed an interest in fitness. Exercise studios of the day favored the already fit customer, so little help was available for those who needed to gain fitness from an otherwise unhealthy state. He established gyms, and his interest in fitness helped him lose .


title: Richard Simmons

text: He later opened his own exercise studio, originally called The Anatomy Asylum, where emphasis was placed on healthy eating in proper portions and enjoyable exercise in a supportive atmosphere. The business originally included a salad bar restaurant called Ruffage, a pun on the word "roughage" (dietary fiber), though it was eventually removed as the focus of The Anatomy Asylum shifted solely to exercise. Later renamed "Slimmons", the establishment continued operations in Beverly Hills and Simmons taught motivational classes and aerobics throughout the week. Slimmons closed in November 2016.


title: Richard Simmons

text: In 2010, Simmons stated he had kept off his own 100+ pound (45kg) weight loss for 42 years, had been helping others lose weight for 35 years, and that in the course of his fitness career, had helped humanity lose approximately 12million pounds (5.5 million kg). Simmons used the Internet as a method of outreach by running his own membership-based website and also has official pages on numerous social-networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube.


title: Richard Simmons

text: Simmons began to draw media attention due to the success of his health club that began with him on "Real People", where he was shown at work. He introduced customers whom he had helped to lose weight. He later had guest roles on "Battlestars", "Body Language", "Super Password", "Win, Lose or Draw", "Match Game" (ABC), "Price Is Right", "$25,000 Pyramid", "Hollywood Squares" (syndicated), and Nickelodeon's "Figure It Out".


title: Richard Simmons

text: Positive viewer reactions landed Simmons a recurring role as himself in "General Hospital" over a 4-year period. This, as well as being in shopping malls, where he taught exercise classes, led to further media attention. In the early 1980s, Simmons hosted two shows "Slim Cookin" and the Emmy Award-winning talk show "The Richard Simmons Show", in which he focused on personal health, fitness, exercise, and healthy cooking. "The Richard Simmons Show" drew thousands of exercise enthusiasts, including SAG/AFTRA actress Lucrecia Sarita Russo, who reportedly transported an entire bus filled with women from Pam's Figure Tique for a lively workout on the show.


title: Richard Simmons

text: He featured as himself on numerous television series, including "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", "CHiPs", "Saturday Night Live", "The Larry Sanders Show", and in the "Arrested Development" episode "Bringing Up Buster." In 1999, he hosted the short-lived television series "DreamMaker". In 2007, he filmed the PBS pledge-drive special "Love Yourself and Win".


title: Richard Simmons

text: He also featured in television advertisements for Sprint, Yoplait, and Herbal Essence shampoos. In late 2007, he was in a "This is SportsCenter" commercial on ESPN as the show's "conditioning coach". In Canada, Simmons was in an advertisement for Simmons mattresses. The mattress company hired the exercise celebrity because of the similarity in name, and for his appeal to the company's target audience of women over 35. Beyond this, no further business partnership exists between them.


title: Richard Simmons

text: In the "Rocko's Modern Life" episode "No Pain, No Gain", Simmons voiced an exercise trainer bearing his animated likeness, leading a class filled with large, anthropomorphic animals.


title: Richard Simmons

text: From 2006 to 2008, he hosted a radio show on Sirius Stars (Sirius Satellite Radio channel 102) titled "Lighten Up with Richard Simmons".


title: Richard Simmons

text: Simmons uses his energetic and motivational demeanor to encourage people to lose weight. His high energy level is always featured in his workout videos. His trademark attire is candy-striped Dolphin shorts and tank tops decorated with Swarovski crystals.


title: Richard Simmons

text: Simmons interacts at a personal level with people using his products. This began by personally answering fan mail he received as a cast member of "General Hospital". As of 2008, he personally answered emails and letters and made hundreds of phone calls each week to those seeking his help.


title: Richard Simmons

text: He claimed to have few friends, saying, "I don't have a lot to offer to one person. I have a lot to offer to a lot of people." Aside from his three Dalmatians and two maids, Simmons lives alone in Beverly Hills, California. While his sexual orientation has been the subject of much speculation, he never publicly discussed his sexuality.


title: Richard Simmons

text: In September 2005, Simmons appeared on "Entertainment Tonight" to discuss the effects of Hurricane Katrina on his family in his hometown of New Orleans, and his involvement in aiding those affected by the hurricane. On August 29, 2006, Simmons was on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" while making a return visit to New Orleans one year after the flooding, a visit he repeated on March 2, 2007, now talking about his recent trip to Washington, DC, to promote and raise awareness about the Strengthening Physical Education Act of 2007 (H.R. 1224).


title: Richard Simmons

text: In 2004, Simmons slapped a man at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. The altercation took place after the man said, "Hey everybody, it's Richard Simmons, let's drop our bags and rock to the '50s.


title: Richard Simmons

text: In 2008, Bridgestone tires ran a commercial during Super Bowl XLII showing a driver avoiding several hazards while driving at night, including threatening to run down Simmons, who critics argued embodied a homophobic sissy stereotype. "Ad Age"s critic Bob Garfield described the ad as "grounded in homophobia".


title: Richard Simmons

text: Simmons has not made any major public appearances since 2014, and stopped appearing in public altogether in February of that year. In March 2016, speculation began that he was being held hostage by his housekeeper. In response, on March 14, 2016, Simmons gave an audio interview on the "Today Show", denying the rumors. In November, the Slimmons fitness gym closed, without any public announcement from Simmons. In February 2017, the podcast "Missing Richard Simmons" launched, investigating why Simmons left public life so suddenly.


title: Richard Simmons

text: In March 2017, Los Angeles Police Department detectives visited Simmons's home to conduct a welfare check, issuing a statement that Simmons is "perfectly fine" and that "right now he is doing what he wants to do and it is his business." On April 19, 2017, following a hospitalization for severe indigestion, Simmons made his first public comment in over a year, posting on Facebook a photo of himself and the message "I'm not 'missing', just a little under the weather". However, the picture that was included in the post was from as far back as 2013, leading to speculation that the person who posted the message might not actually have been Simmons.


title: Richard Simmons

text: In May 2017, he sued the "National Enquirer", Radar Online, and American Media, Inc. for libel and false claims that he was undergoing gender reassignment. In September 2017, Simmons lost the lawsuit, and was ordered to pay the defendants' attorney's fees. The judge ruled, "because courts have long held that a misidentification of certain immutable characteristics do not naturally tend to injure one's reputation, even if there is sizeable portion of the population who hold prejudices against those characteristics, misidentification of a person as transgender is not actionable defamation absent special damages."


title: Richard Simmons

text: In June 2018, he sued a Los Angeles private investigator, claiming he had placed a tracking device over a year earlier on the only vehicle Simmons used for transportation, noting that such tracking is in violation of California law. In July 2018, Simmons amended the suit, alleging the investigator had been hired by "In Touch Weekly" and prosecutors filed a criminal complaint. In May 2020, a California appellate court upheld a trial judge's decision allowing Simmons' lawsuit to move forward.


title: Richard Simmons

text: In August 2022, in response to continued rumors and a TMZ documentary "What Really Happened to Richard Simmons" claiming that knee problems forced Simmons out of public life, Simmons issued a statement to the "New York Post" that he "is happy, healthy, and living the life he has chosen to live."


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be deterministic in principle. They are often used in physical and mathematical problems and are most useful when it is difficult or impossible to use other approaches. Monte Carlo methods are mainly used in three problem classes: optimization, numerical integration, and generating draws from a probability distribution.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: In physics-related problems, Monte Carlo methods are useful for simulating systems with many coupled degrees of freedom, such as fluids, disordered materials, strongly coupled solids, and cellular structures (see cellular Potts model, interacting particle systems, McKean–Vlasov processes, kinetic models of gases).


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Other examples include modeling phenomena with significant uncertainty in inputs such as the calculation of risk in business and, in mathematics, evaluation of multidimensional definite integrals with complicated boundary conditions. In application to systems engineering problems (space, oil exploration, aircraft design, etc.), Monte Carlo–based predictions of failure, cost overruns and schedule overruns are routinely better than human intuition or alternative "soft" methods.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: In principle, Monte Carlo methods can be used to solve any problem having a probabilistic interpretation. By the law of large numbers, integrals described by the expected value of some random variable can be approximated by taking the empirical mean ( the 'sample mean') of independent samples of the variable. When the probability distribution of the variable is parameterized, mathematicians often use a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler. The central idea is to design a judicious Markov chain model with a prescribed stationary probability distribution. That is, in the limit, the samples being generated by the MCMC method will be samples from the desired (target) distribution. By the ergodic theorem, the stationary distribution is approximated by the empirical measures of the random states of the MCMC sampler.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: In other problems, the objective is generating draws from a sequence of probability distributions satisfying a nonlinear evolution equation. These flows of probability distributions can always be interpreted as the distributions of the random states of a Markov process whose transition probabilities depend on the distributions of the current random states (see McKean–Vlasov processes, nonlinear filtering equation). In other instances we are given a flow of probability distributions with an increasing level of sampling complexity (path spaces models with an increasing time horizon, Boltzmann–Gibbs measures associated with decreasing temperature parameters, and many others). These models can also be seen as the evolution of the law of the random states of a nonlinear Markov chain. A natural way to simulate these sophisticated nonlinear Markov processes is to sample multiple copies of the process, replacing in the evolution equation the unknown distributions of the random states by the sampled empirical measures. In contrast with traditional Monte Carlo and MCMC methodologies, these mean-field particle techniques rely on sequential interacting samples. The terminology "mean field" reflects the fact that each of the "samples" ( particles, individuals, walkers, agents, creatures, or phenotypes) interacts with the empirical measures of the process. When the size of the system tends to infinity, these random empirical measures converge to the deterministic distribution of the random states of the nonlinear Markov chain, so that the statistical interaction between particles vanishes.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Despite its conceptual and algorithmic simplicity, the computational cost associated with a Monte Carlo simulation can be staggeringly high. In general the method requires many samples to get a good approximation, which may incur an arbitrarily large total runtime if the processing time of a single sample is high. Although this is a severe limitation in very complex problems, the embarrassingly parallel nature of the algorithm allows this large cost to be reduced (perhaps to a feasible level) through parallel computing strategies in local processors, clusters, cloud computing, GPU, FPGA, etc.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: For example, consider a quadrant (circular sector) inscribed in a unit square. Given that the ratio of their areas is , the value of can be approximated using a Monte Carlo method:


title: Monte Carlo method

text: In this procedure the domain of inputs is the square that circumscribes the quadrant. We generate random inputs by scattering grains over the square then perform a computation on each input (test whether it falls within the quadrant). Aggregating the results yields our final result, the approximation of .


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Uses of Monte Carlo methods require large amounts of random numbers, and their use benefitted greatly from pseudorandom number generators, which were far quicker to use than the tables of random numbers that had been previously used for statistical sampling.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Before the Monte Carlo method was developed, simulations tested a previously understood deterministic problem, and statistical sampling was used to estimate uncertainties in the simulations. Monte Carlo simulations invert this approach, solving deterministic problems using probabilistic metaheuristics (see simulated annealing).


title: Monte Carlo method

text: An early variant of the Monte Carlo method was devised to solve the Buffon's needle problem, in which can be estimated by dropping needles on a floor made of parallel equidistant strips. In the 1930s, Enrico Fermi first experimented with the Monte Carlo method while studying neutron diffusion, but he did not publish this work.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: In the late 1940s, Stanislaw Ulam invented the modern version of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method while he was working on nuclear weapons projects at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1946, nuclear weapons physicists at Los Alamos were investigating neutron diffusion in the core of a nuclear weapon. Despite having most of the necessary data, such as the average distance a neutron would travel in a substance before it collided with an atomic nucleus and how much energy the neutron was likely to give off following a collision, the Los Alamos physicists were unable to solve the problem using conventional, deterministic mathematical methods. Ulam proposed using random experiments. He recounts his inspiration as follows:


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Being secret, the work of von Neumann and Ulam required a code name. A colleague of von Neumann and Ulam, Nicholas Metropolis, suggested using the name "Monte Carlo", which refers to the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco where Ulam's uncle would borrow money from relatives to gamble.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods were central to the simulations required for the Manhattan Project, though severely limited by the computational tools at the time. Von Neumann, Nicholas Metropolis and others programmed the ENIAC computer to perform the first fully automated Monte Carlo calculations, of a fission weapon core, in the spring of 1948. In the 1950s Monte Carlo methods were used at Los Alamos for the development of the hydrogen bomb, and became popularized in the fields of physics, physical chemistry, and operations research. The Rand Corporation and the U.S. Air Force were two of the major organizations responsible for funding and disseminating information on Monte Carlo methods during this time, and they began to find a wide application in many different fields.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The theory of more sophisticated mean-field type particle Monte Carlo methods had certainly started by the mid-1960s, with the work of Henry P. McKean Jr. on Markov interpretations of a class of nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations arising in fluid mechanics. We also quote an earlier pioneering article by Theodore E. Harris and Herman Kahn, published in 1951, using mean-field genetic-type Monte Carlo methods for estimating particle transmission energies. Mean-field genetic type Monte Carlo methodologies are also used as heuristic natural search algorithms (a.k.a. metaheuristic) in evolutionary computing. The origins of these mean-field computational techniques can be traced to 1950 and 1954 with the work of Alan Turing on genetic type mutation-selection learning machines and the articles by Nils Aall Barricelli at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Quantum Monte Carlo, and more specifically diffusion Monte Carlo methods can also be interpreted as a mean-field particle Monte Carlo approximation of Feynman–Kac path integrals. The origins of Quantum Monte Carlo methods are often attributed to Enrico Fermi and Robert Richtmyer who developed in 1948 a mean-field particle interpretation of neutron-chain reactions, but the first heuristic-like and genetic type particle algorithm (a.k.a. Resampled or Reconfiguration Monte Carlo methods) for estimating ground state energies of quantum systems (in reduced matrix models) is due to Jack H. Hetherington in 1984 In molecular chemistry, the use of genetic heuristic-like particle methodologies (a.k.a. pruning and enrichment strategies) can be traced back to 1955 with the seminal work of Marshall N. Rosenbluth and Arianna W. Rosenbluth.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The use of Sequential Monte Carlo in advanced signal processing and Bayesian inference is more recent. It was in 1993, that Gordon et al., published in their seminal work the first application of a Monte Carlo resampling algorithm in Bayesian statistical inference. The authors named their algorithm 'the bootstrap filter', and demonstrated that compared to other filtering methods, their bootstrap algorithm does not require any assumption about that state-space or the noise of the system. We also quote another pioneering article in this field of Genshiro Kitagawa on a related "Monte Carlo filter", and the ones by Pierre Del Moral and Himilcon Carvalho, Pierre Del Moral, André Monin and Gérard Salut on particle filters published in the mid-1990s. Particle filters were also developed in signal processing in 1989–1992 by P. Del Moral, J. C. Noyer, G. Rigal, and G. Salut in the LAAS-CNRS in a series of restricted and classified research reports with STCAN (Service Technique des Constructions et Armes Navales), the IT company DIGILOG, and the LAAS-CNRS (the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems) on radar/sonar and GPS signal processing problems. These Sequential Monte Carlo methodologies can be interpreted as an acceptance-rejection sampler equipped with an interacting recycling mechanism.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: From 1950 to 1996, all the publications on Sequential Monte Carlo methodologies, including the pruning and resample Monte Carlo methods introduced in computational physics and molecular chemistry, present natural and heuristic-like algorithms applied to different situations without a single proof of their consistency, nor a discussion on the bias of the estimates and on genealogical and ancestral tree based algorithms. The mathematical foundations and the first rigorous analysis of these particle algorithms were written by Pierre Del Moral in 1996.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Branching type particle methodologies with varying population sizes were also developed in the end of the 1990s by Dan Crisan, Jessica Gaines and Terry Lyons, and by Dan Crisan, Pierre Del Moral and Terry Lyons. Further developments in this field were developed in 2000 by P. Del Moral, A. Guionnet and L. Miclo.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: There is no consensus on how "Monte Carlo" should be defined. For example, Ripley defines most probabilistic modeling as "stochastic simulation", with "Monte Carlo" being reserved for Monte Carlo integration and Monte Carlo statistical tests. Sawilowsky distinguishes between a simulation, a Monte Carlo method, and a Monte Carlo simulation: a simulation is a fictitious representation of reality, a Monte Carlo method is a technique that can be used to solve a mathematical or statistical problem, and a Monte Carlo simulation uses repeated sampling to obtain the statistical properties of some phenomenon (or behavior). Examples:


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Kalos and Whitlock point out that such distinctions are not always easy to maintain. For example, the emission of radiation from atoms is a natural stochastic process. It can be simulated directly, or its average behavior can be described by stochastic equations that can themselves be solved using Monte Carlo methods. "Indeed, the same computer code can be viewed simultaneously as a 'natural simulation' or as a solution of the equations by natural sampling."


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The main idea behind this method is that the results are computed based on repeated random sampling and statistical analysis. The Monte Carlo simulation is, in fact, random experimentations, in the case that, the results of these experiments are not well known.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo simulations are typically characterized by many unknown parameters, many of which are difficult to obtain experimentally. Monte Carlo simulation methods do not always require truly random numbers to be useful (although, for some applications such as primality testing, unpredictability is vital). Many of the most useful techniques use deterministic, pseudorandom sequences, making it easy to test and re-run simulations. The only quality usually necessary to make good simulations is for the pseudo-random sequence to appear "random enough" in a certain sense.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: What this means depends on the application, but typically they should pass a series of statistical tests. Testing that the numbers are uniformly distributed or follow another desired distribution when a large enough number of elements of the sequence are considered is one of the simplest and most common ones. Weak correlations between successive samples are also often desirable/necessary.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Pseudo-random number sampling algorithms are used to transform uniformly distributed pseudo-random numbers into numbers that are distributed according to a given probability distribution.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Low-discrepancy sequences are often used instead of random sampling from a space as they ensure even coverage and normally have a faster order of convergence than Monte Carlo simulations using random or pseudorandom sequences. Methods based on their use are called quasi-Monte Carlo methods.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: In an effort to assess the impact of random number quality on Monte Carlo simulation outcomes, astrophysical researchers tested cryptographically-secure pseudorandom numbers generated via Intel's RDRAND instruction set, as compared to those derived from algorithms, like the Mersenne Twister, in Monte Carlo simulations of radio flares from brown dwarfs. RDRAND is the closest pseudorandom number generator to a true random number generator. No statistically significant difference was found between models generated with typical pseudorandom number generators and RDRAND for trials consisting of the generation of 10 random numbers.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: There are ways of using probabilities that are definitely not Monte Carlo simulations – for example, deterministic modeling using single-point estimates. Each uncertain variable within a model is assigned a "best guess" estimate. Scenarios (such as best, worst, or most likely case) for each input variable are chosen and the results recorded.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: By contrast, Monte Carlo simulations sample from a probability distribution for each variable to produce hundreds or thousands of possible outcomes. The results are analyzed to get probabilities of different outcomes occurring. For example, a comparison of a spreadsheet cost construction model run using traditional "what if" scenarios, and then running the comparison again with Monte Carlo simulation and triangular probability distributions shows that the Monte Carlo analysis has a narrower range than the "what if" analysis. This is because the "what if" analysis gives equal weight to all scenarios (see quantifying uncertainty in corporate finance), while the Monte Carlo method hardly samples in the very low probability regions. The samples in such regions are called "rare events".


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods are especially useful for simulating phenomena with significant uncertainty in inputs and systems with many coupled degrees of freedom. Areas of application include:


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods are very important in computational physics, physical chemistry, and related applied fields, and have diverse applications from complicated quantum chromodynamics calculations to designing heat shields and aerodynamic forms as well as in modeling radiation transport for radiation dosimetry calculations. In statistical physics, Monte Carlo molecular modeling is an alternative to computational molecular dynamics, and Monte Carlo methods are used to compute statistical field theories of simple particle and polymer systems. Quantum Monte Carlo methods solve the many-body problem for quantum systems. In radiation materials science, the binary collision approximation for simulating ion implantation is usually based on a Monte Carlo approach to select the next colliding atom. In experimental particle physics, Monte Carlo methods are used for designing detectors, understanding their behavior and comparing experimental data to theory. In astrophysics, they are used in such diverse manners as to model both galaxy evolution and microwave radiation transmission through a rough planetary surface. Monte Carlo methods are also used in the ensemble models that form the basis of modern weather forecasting.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods are widely used in engineering for sensitivity analysis and quantitative probabilistic analysis in process design. The need arises from the interactive, co-linear and non-linear behavior of typical process simulations. For example,


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on Monte Carlo methods in probability density function analysis of radiative forcing.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods are used in various fields of computational biology, for example for Bayesian inference in phylogeny, or for studying biological systems such as genomes, proteins, or membranes.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The systems can be studied in the coarse-grained or "ab initio" frameworks depending on the desired accuracy.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Computer simulations allow us to monitor the local environment of a particular molecule to see if some chemical reaction is happening for instance. In cases where it is not feasible to conduct a physical experiment, thought experiments can be conducted (for instance: breaking bonds, introducing impurities at specific sites, changing the local/global structure, or introducing external fields).


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Path tracing, occasionally referred to as Monte Carlo ray tracing, renders a 3D scene by randomly tracing samples of possible light paths. Repeated sampling of any given pixel will eventually cause the average of the samples to converge on the correct solution of the rendering equation, making it one of the most physically accurate 3D graphics rendering methods in existence.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The standards for Monte Carlo experiments in statistics were set by Sawilowsky. In applied statistics, Monte Carlo methods may be used for at least four purposes:


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods are also a compromise between approximate randomization and permutation tests. An approximate randomization test is based on a specified subset of all permutations (which entails potentially enormous housekeeping of which permutations have been considered). The Monte Carlo approach is based on a specified number of randomly drawn permutations (exchanging a minor loss in precision if a permutation is drawn twice—or more frequently—for the efficiency of not having to track which permutations have already been selected).


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods have been developed into a technique called Monte-Carlo tree search that is useful for searching for the best move in a game. Possible moves are organized in a search tree and many random simulations are used to estimate the long-term potential of each move. A black box simulator represents the opponent's moves.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The net effect, over the course of many simulated games, is that the value of a node representing a move will go up or down, hopefully corresponding to whether or not that node represents a good move.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo Tree Search has been used successfully to play games such as Go, Tantrix, Battleship, Havannah, and Arimaa.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods are also efficient in solving coupled integral differential equations of radiation fields and energy transport, and thus these methods have been used in global illumination computations that produce photo-realistic images of virtual 3D models, with applications in video games, architecture, design, computer generated films, and cinematic special effects.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The US Coast Guard utilizes Monte Carlo methods within its computer modeling software SAROPS in order to calculate the probable locations of vessels during search and rescue operations. Each simulation can generate as many as ten thousand data points that are randomly distributed based upon provided variables. Search patterns are then generated based upon extrapolations of these data in order to optimize the probability of containment (POC) and the probability of detection (POD), which together will equal an overall probability of success (POS). Ultimately this serves as a practical application of probability distribution in order to provide the swiftest and most expedient method of rescue, saving both lives and resources.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo simulation is commonly used to evaluate the risk and uncertainty that would affect the outcome of different decision options. Monte Carlo simulation allows the business risk analyst to incorporate the total effects of uncertainty in variables like sales volume, commodity and labour prices, interest and exchange rates, as well as the effect of distinct risk events like the cancellation of a contract or the change of a tax law.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods in finance are often used to evaluate investments in projects at a business unit or corporate level, or other financial valuations. They can be used to model project schedules, where simulations aggregate estimates for worst-case, best-case, and most likely durations for each task to determine outcomes for the overall project. Monte Carlo methods are also used in option pricing, default risk analysis. Additionally, they can be used to estimate the financial impact of medical interventions.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: A Monte Carlo approach was used for evaluating the potential value of a proposed program to help female petitioners in Wisconsin be successful in their applications for harassment and domestic abuse restraining orders. It was proposed to help women succeed in their petitions by providing them with greater advocacy thereby potentially reducing the risk of rape and physical assault. However, there were many variables in play that could not be estimated perfectly, including the effectiveness of restraining orders, the success rate of petitioners both with and without advocacy, and many others. The study ran trials that varied these variables to come up with an overall estimate of the success level of the proposed program as a whole.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo approach had also been used to simulate the number of book publications based on book genre in Malaysia. The Monte Carlo simulation utilized previous published National Book publication data and book's price according to book genre in the local market. The Monte Carlo results were used to determine what kind of book genre that Malaysians are fond of and was used to compare book publications between Malaysia and Japan.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: In general, the Monte Carlo methods are used in mathematics to solve various problems by generating suitable random numbers (see also Random number generation) and observing that fraction of the numbers that obeys some property or properties. The method is useful for obtaining numerical solutions to problems too complicated to solve analytically. The most common application of the Monte Carlo method is Monte Carlo integration.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Deterministic numerical integration algorithms work well in a small number of dimensions, but encounter two problems when the functions have many variables. First, the number of function evaluations needed increases rapidly with the number of dimensions. For example, if 10 evaluations provide adequate accuracy in one dimension, then 10 points are needed for 100 dimensions—far too many to be computed. This is called the curse of dimensionality. Second, the boundary of a multidimensional region may be very complicated, so it may not be feasible to reduce the problem to an iterated integral. 100 dimensions is by no means unusual, since in many physical problems, a "dimension" is equivalent to a degree of freedom.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Monte Carlo methods provide a way out of this exponential increase in computation time. As long as the function in question is reasonably well-behaved, it can be estimated by randomly selecting points in 100-dimensional space, and taking some kind of average of the function values at these points. By the central limit theorem, this method displays formula_1 convergence—i.e., quadrupling the number of sampled points halves the error, regardless of the number of dimensions.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: A refinement of this method, known as importance sampling in statistics, involves sampling the points randomly, but more frequently where the integrand is large. To do this precisely one would have to already know the integral, but one can approximate the integral by an integral of a similar function or use adaptive routines such as stratified sampling, recursive stratified sampling, adaptive umbrella sampling or the VEGAS algorithm.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: A similar approach, the quasi-Monte Carlo method, uses low-discrepancy sequences. These sequences "fill" the area better and sample the most important points more frequently, so quasi-Monte Carlo methods can often converge on the integral more quickly.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Another class of methods for sampling points in a volume is to simulate random walks over it (Markov chain Monte Carlo). Such methods include the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, Gibbs sampling, Wang and Landau algorithm, and interacting type MCMC methodologies such as the sequential Monte Carlo samplers.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Another powerful and very popular application for random numbers in numerical simulation is in numerical optimization. The problem is to minimize (or maximize) functions of some vector that often has many dimensions. Many problems can be phrased in this way: for example, a computer chess program could be seen as trying to find the set of, say, 10 moves that produces the best evaluation function at the end. In the traveling salesman problem the goal is to minimize distance traveled. There are also applications to engineering design, such as multidisciplinary design optimization. It has been applied with quasi-one-dimensional models to solve particle dynamics problems by efficiently exploring large configuration space. Reference is a comprehensive review of many issues related to simulation and optimization.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The traveling salesman problem is what is called a conventional optimization problem. That is, all the facts (distances between each destination point) needed to determine the optimal path to follow are known with certainty and the goal is to run through the possible travel choices to come up with the one with the lowest total distance. However, let's assume that instead of wanting to minimize the total distance traveled to visit each desired destination, we wanted to minimize the total time needed to reach each destination. This goes beyond conventional optimization since travel time is inherently uncertain (traffic jams, time of day, etc.). As a result, to determine our optimal path we would want to use simulation - optimization to first understand the range of potential times it could take to go from one point to another (represented by a probability distribution in this case rather than a specific distance) and then optimize our travel decisions to identify the best path to follow taking that uncertainty into account.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Probabilistic formulation of inverse problems leads to the definition of a probability distribution in the model space. This probability distribution combines prior information with new information obtained by measuring some observable parameters (data).


title: Monte Carlo method

text: As, in the general case, the theory linking data with model parameters is nonlinear, the posterior probability in the model space may not be easy to describe (it may be multimodal, some moments may not be defined, etc.).


title: Monte Carlo method

text: When analyzing an inverse problem, obtaining a maximum likelihood model is usually not sufficient, as we normally also wish to have information on the resolution power of the data. In the general case we may have many model parameters, and an inspection of the marginal probability densities of interest may be impractical, or even useless. But it is possible to pseudorandomly generate a large collection of models according to the posterior probability distribution and to analyze and display the models in such a way that information on the relative likelihoods of model properties is conveyed to the spectator. This can be accomplished by means of an efficient Monte Carlo method, even in cases where no explicit formula for the "a priori" distribution is available.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: The best-known importance sampling method, the Metropolis algorithm, can be generalized, and this gives a method that allows analysis of (possibly highly nonlinear) inverse problems with complex "a priori" information and data with an arbitrary noise distribution.


title: Monte Carlo method

text: Popular exposition of the Monte Carlo Method was conducted by McCracken. Method's general philosophy was discussed by Elishakoff and Grüne-Yanoff and Weirich.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa" class was a class of six fast battleships ordered by the United States Navy in 1939 and 1940. They were initially intended to intercept fast capital ships such as the Japanese while also being capable of serving in a traditional battle line alongside slower battleships and act as its "fast wing". The "Iowa" class was designed to meet the Second London Naval Treaty's "escalator clause" limit of standard displacement. Four vessels, , , , and , were completed; two more, and , were laid down but canceled in 1945 and 1958, respectively, before completion, and both hulls were scrapped in 1958–1959.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The four "Iowa"-class ships were the last battleships commissioned in the US Navy. All older US battleships were decommissioned by 1947 and stricken from the "Naval Vessel Register" (NVR) by 1963. Between the mid-1940s and the early 1990s, the "Iowa"-class battleships fought in four major US wars. In the Pacific Theater of World War II, they served primarily as fast escorts for s of the Fast Carrier Task Force and also shelled Japanese positions. During the Korean War, the battleships provided naval gunfire support (NGFS) for United Nations forces, and in 1968, "New Jersey" shelled Viet Cong and Vietnam People's Army forces in the Vietnam War. All four were reactivated and modernized at the direction of the United States Congress in 1981, and armed with missiles during the 1980s, as part of the 600-ship Navy initiative. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, "Missouri" and "Wisconsin" fired missiles and guns at Iraqi targets.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Costly to maintain, the battleships were decommissioned during the post-Cold War draw down in the early 1990s. All four were initially removed from the "Naval Vessel Register", but the United States Congress compelled the Navy to reinstate two of them on the grounds that existing NGFS would be inadequate for amphibious operations. This resulted in a lengthy debate over whether battleships should have a role in the modern navy. Ultimately, all four ships were stricken from the "Naval Vessel Register" and released for donation to non-profit organizations. With the transfer of "Iowa" in 2012, all four are part of non-profit maritime museums across the US.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The vessels that eventually became the "Iowa"-class battleships were born from the US Navy's War Plan Orange, a Pacific war plan against Japan. War planners anticipated that the US fleet would engage and advance in the Central Pacific, with a long line of communication and logistics that would be vulnerable to high-speed Japanese cruisers. The chief concern was that the US Navy's traditional 21-knot battle line would be too slow to force these Japanese task forces into battle, while faster carriers and their cruiser escorts would be outmatched by the Japanese battlecruisers, which had been upgraded in the 1930s to fast battleships. As a result, the US Navy envisioned a fast detachment of the battle line that could bring the Japanese fleet into battle. Even during the development process of the preceding and battleships, designs that could achieve over 30 knots in order to counter the threat of fast "big gun" ships were seriously considered. At the same time, a special strike force consisting of fast battleships operating alongside carriers and destroyers was being envisaged; such a force could operate independently in advance areas and act as scouts. This concept eventually evolved into the Fast Carrier Task Force, though initially the carriers were believed to be subordinate to the battleship.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Another factor was the "escalator clause" of the Second London Naval Treaty, which reverted the gun caliber limit from to . Japan had refused to sign the treaty and in particular refused to accept the 14-inch gun caliber limit or the 5:5:3 ratio of warship tonnage limits for Britain, United States, and Japan respectively. This resulted in the three treaty powers, the United States, Britain, and France, invoking the escalator clause after April 1937. Circulation of intelligence evidence in November 1937 of Japanese capital ships violating naval treaties caused the treaty powers to expand the escalator clause in June 1938, which amended the standard displacement limit of battleships from to .


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Work on what would eventually become the "Iowa"-class battleship began on the first studies in early 1938, at the direction of Admiral Thomas C. Hart, head of the General Board, following the planned invocation of the "escalator clause" that would permit maximum standard capital ship displacement of . Using the additional over previous designs, the studies included schemes for "slow" battleships that increased armament and protection as well as "fast" battleships capable of or more. One of the "slow" designs was an expanded "South Dakota"-class carrying either twelve 16-inch/45 caliber Mark 6 guns or nine /48 guns and with more armor and a power plant large enough to drive the larger ship through the water at the same 27-knot maximum speed as the "South Dakota"s. While the "fast" studies would result in the "Iowa" class, the "slow" design studies would eventually settle on twelve 16-inch guns and evolve into the design for the after all treaty restrictions were removed following the start of World War II. Priority was given to the "fast" design in order to counter and defeat Japan's s, whose higher speed advantage over existing U.S. battleships might let them "penetrate U.S. cruisers, thereby making it 'open season' on U.S. supply ships", and then overwhelm the Japanese battle line was therefore a major driving force in setting the design criteria for the new ships, as was the restricting width of the Panama Canal.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: For "fast" battleships, one such design, pursued by the Design Division section of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, was a "cruiser-killer". Beginning on 17 January 1938, under Captain A.J. Chantry, the group drew up plans for ships with twelve 16-inch and twenty guns, Panamax capability but otherwise unlimited displacement, a top speed of and a range of when traveling at the more economical speed of . Their plan fulfilled these requirements with a ship of standard displacement, but Chantry believed that more could be done if the ship were to be this large; with a displacement greater than that of most battleships, its armor would have protected it only against the weapons carried by heavy cruisers.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Three improved plans – "A", "B", and "C" – were designed at the end of January. An increase in draft, vast additions to the armor, and the substitution of twelve guns in the secondary battery was common among the three designs. "A" was the largest, at standard, and was the only one to still carry the twelve 16-inch guns in four triple turrets (3-gun turrets according to US Navy). It required to make . "B" was the smallest at standard; like "A" it had a top speed of 32.5 knots, but "B" only required to make this speed. It also carried only nine 16-inch guns, in three triple turrets. "C" was similar but it added (for a total of ), to make the original requirement of . The weight required for this and a longer belt – , compared with for "B" – meant that the ship was standard.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In March 1938, the General Board followed the recommendations of the Battleship Design Advisory Board, which was composed of the naval architect William Francis Gibbs, William Hovgaard (then president of New York Shipbuilding), John Metten, Joseph W. Powell, and the long-retired Admiral and former Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance Joseph Strauss. The board requested an entirely new design study, again focusing on increasing the size of the "South Dakota"-class. The first plans made for this indicated that was possible on a standard displacement of about . could be bought with and a standard displacement of around , which was well below the London Treaty's "escalator clause" maximum limit of .


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: These designs were able to convince the General Board that a reasonably well-designed and balanced 33-knot "fast" battleship was possible within the terms of the "escalator clause". However, further studies revealed major problems with the estimates. The speed of the ships meant that more freeboard would be needed both fore and amidships, the latter requiring an additional foot of armored freeboard. Along with this came the associated weight in supporting these new strains: the structure of the ship had to be reinforced and the power plant enlarged to avoid a drop in speed. In all, about had to be added, and the large margin the navy designers had previously thought they had – roughly – was suddenly vanishing. The draft of the ships was also allowed to increase, which enabled the beam to narrow and thus reduced required power (since lower beam-to-draft ratio reduces wave-making resistance). This also allowed the ships to be shortened which reduced weight.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: With the additional displacement, the General Board was incredulous that a tonnage increase of would allow only the addition of over the "South Dakota"s. Rather than retaining the 16-inch/45 caliber Mark 6 guns used in the "South Dakota"s, they ordered that the preliminary design would have to include the more powerful but significantly heavier 16-inch/50 caliber Mark 2 guns left over from the canceled s and battleships of the early 1920s.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The 16"/50 turret weighed some more than the 16"/45 turret already in use and also had a larger barbette diameter of compared to the latter’s barrette diameter of , so the total weight gain was about . This put the ship at a total of – well over the limit. An apparent savior appeared in a Bureau of Ordnance preliminary design for a turret that could carry the 50-caliber guns while also fit in the smaller barbette of the 45-caliber gun turret. Other weight savings were achieved through thinning some armor elements and substituting construction steel with armor-grade Special Treatment Steel (STS) in certain areas. The net savings reduced the preliminary design displacement to standard, though the margin remained tight. This breakthrough was shown to the General Board as part of a series of designs on 2 June 1938.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: However, the Bureau of Ordnance continued working on the turret with the larger barbette, while the Bureau of Construction and Repair used the smaller barbettes in the contract design of the new battleships. As the bureaus were independent of one another, they did not realize that the two plans could not go together until November 1938, when the contract design was in the final stages of refinement. By this time, the ships could not use the larger barbette, as it would require extensive alterations to the design and would result in substantial weight penalties. Reverting back to the 45-caliber gun was also deemed unacceptable. The General Board was astounded; one member asked the head of the Bureau of Ordnance if it had occurred to him that Construction and Repair would have wanted to know what turret his subordinates were working on "as a matter of common sense". A complete scrapping of plans was avoided only when designers within the Bureau of Ordnance were able to design a new 50-caliber gun, the Mark 7, that was both lighter and smaller in outside diameter; this allowed it to be placed in a turret that would fit in the smaller barbette. The redesigned 3-gun turret, equipped as it was with the Mark 7 naval gun, provided an overall weight saving of nearly to the overall design of the "Iowa" class. The contract design displacement subsequently stood at standard and full load.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In May 1938, the United States Congress passed the Second Vinson Act which "mandated a 20% increase in strength of the United States Navy". The act was sponsored by Carl Vinson, a Democratic Congressman from Georgia who was Chairman of the House Naval Affairs and Armed Services Committee. The Second Vinson Act updated the provisions of the Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934 and the Naval Act of 1936, which had "authorized the construction of the first American battleships in 17 years", based on the provisions of the London Naval Treaty of 1930; this act was quickly signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and provided the funding to build the "Iowa" class. Each ship cost approximately US$100 million.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: As 1938 drew to a close the contract design of the "Iowa"s was nearly complete, but it would continuously evolve as the New York Navy Yard, the lead shipyard, conducted the final detail design. These revisions included changing the design of the foremast, replacing the original /75-caliber guns that were to be used for anti-aircraft (AA) work with /70 caliber Oerlikon cannons and /56 caliber Bofors guns, and moving the combat information center into the armored hull. Additionally, in November 1939, the New York Navy Yard greatly modified the internal subdivision of the machinery rooms, as tests had shown the underwater protection in these rooms to be inadequate. The longitudinal subdivision of these rooms was doubled, and the result of this was clearly beneficial: "The prospective effect of flooding was roughly halved and the number of uptakes and hence of openings in the third deck greatly reduced." Although the changes meant extra weight and increasing the beam by to , this was no longer a major issue; Britain and France had renounced the Second London Naval Treaty soon after the beginning of the Second World War. The design displacement was standard, approximately 2% overweight, when "Iowa" and "New Jersey" were laid down in June and September 1940. By the time the "Iowa"s were completed and commissioned in 1943–44, the considerable increase in anti-aircraft armament – along with their associated splinter protection and crew accommodations – and additional electronics had increased standard displacement to some , while full load displacement became .


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa"-class battleships are long at the waterline and long overall with beam of . During World War II, the draft was at full load displacement of and at design combat displacement of . Like the two previous classes of American fast battleships, the "Iowa"s feature a triple bottom under the armored citadel and armored skegs around the inboard shafts. The dimensions of the "Iowa"s were strongly influenced by speed. When the Second Vinson Act was passed by the United States Congress in 1938, the US Navy moved quickly to develop a 45,000-ton-standard battleship that would pass through the wide Panama Canal. Drawing on a 1935 empirical formula for predicting a ship's maximum speed based on scale-model studies in flumes of various hull forms and propellers and a newly developed empirical theorem that related waterline length to maximum beam, the Navy drafted plans for a battleship class with a maximum beam of which, when multiplied by 7.96, produced a waterline length of . The Navy also called for the class to have a lengthened forecastle and amidship, which would increase speed, and a bulbous bow.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa"s exhibit good stability, making them steady gun platforms. At design combat displacement, the ships' (GM) metacentric height was . They also have excellent maneuverability in the open water for their size, while seakeeping is described as good, but not outstanding. In particular, the long fine bow and sudden widening of the hull just in front of the foremost turret contributed to the ships being rather wet for their size. This hull form also resulted in very intense spray formations, which led to some difficulty refueling escorting destroyers.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The primary guns used on these battleships are the nine /50-caliber Mark 7 naval guns, a compromise design developed to fit inside the barbettes. These guns fire high explosive- and armor-piercing shells, and can fire a 16-inch shell approximately .<ref name="NavWeaps 16/50"></ref> The guns are housed in three 3-gun turrets: two forward of the battleship's superstructure and one aft, in a configuration known as "2-A-1". The guns are long (50 times their 16-inch bore, or 50 calibers from breechface to muzzle). About protrudes from the gun house. Each gun weighs about without the breech, or with the breech. They fired armor-piercing projectiles at a muzzle velocity of , or high-capacity projectiles at , up to . At maximum range, the projectile spends almost  minutes in flight. The maximum firing rate for each gun is two rounds per minute.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Each gun rests within an armored turret, but only the top of the turret protrudes above the main deck. The turret extends either four decks (Turrets 1 and 3) or five decks (Turret 2) down. The lower spaces contain rooms for handling the projectiles and storing the powder bags used to fire them. Each turret required a crew of between 85 and 110 men to operate. The original cost for each turret was US$1.4 million, but this figure does not take into account the cost of the guns themselves. The turrets are "three-gun", not "triple", because each barrel is individually sleeved and can be elevated and fired independently. The ship could fire any combination of its guns, including a broadside of all nine. The fire control was performed by the Mark 38 Gun Fire Control System (GFCS); the firing solutions were computed with the Mark 8 rangekeeper, an analogue computer that automatically receives information from the director and Mark 8/13 fire control radar, stable vertical, ship pitometer log and gyrocompass, and anemometer. The GFCS uses remote power control (RPC) for automatic gun laying.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The large-caliber guns were designed to fire two different conventional 16-inch shells: the Mk. 8 "Super-heavy" APC (Armor Piercing, Capped) shell for anti-ship and anti-structure work, and the Mk. 13 high-explosive round designed for use against unarmored targets and shore bombardment. When firing the same conventional shell, the 16-inch/45 caliber Mark 6 used by the fast battleships of the and es had a slight advantage over the 16-inch/50 caliber Mark 7 gun when hitting deck armor – a shell from a 45 cal gun would be slower, meaning that it would have a steeper trajectory as it descended. At , a shell from a 45 cal would strike a ship at an angle of 45.2 degrees, as opposed to 36 degrees with the 50 cal.<ref name="NavWeaps 16/45"></ref> The Mark 7 had a greater maximum range over the Mark 6: vs .


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In the 1950s, the W23, an adaptation of the W19 nuclear artillery shell was developed specifically for the 16-inch guns. The shell weighed had an estimated yield of , and its introduction made the "Iowa"-class battleships' 16-inch guns the world's largest nuclear artillery, and made these four battleships the only US Navy ships ever to have nuclear shells for naval guns. Although developed for exclusive use by the battleship's guns it is not known if any of the "Iowa"s actually carried these shells while in active service due to the United States Navy's policy of refusing to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weaponry aboard its ships. In 1991 the United States unilaterally withdrew all of its nuclear artillery shells from service, and dismantling of the US nuclear artillery inventory is said to have been completed in 2004.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa"s carried twenty /38 caliber Mark 12 guns in ten Mark 28 Mod 2 enclosed base ring mounts. Originally designed to be mounted upon destroyers built in the 1930s, these guns were so successful that they were added to many American ships during the Second World War, including every major ship type and many smaller warships constructed between 1934 and 1945. They were considered to be "highly reliable, robust and accurate" by the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance.<ref name="NavWeaps 5/38"></ref>


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Each 5-inch/38 gun weighed almost without the breech; the entire mount weighed . It was long overall, had a bore length of and a rifling length of . The gun could fire shells at about ; about 4,600 could be fired before the barrel needed to be replaced. Minimum and maximum elevations were −15 and 85 degrees respectively. The guns' elevation could be raised or lowered at about 15 degrees per second. The mounts closest to the bow and stern could aim from −150 to 150 degrees; the others were restricted to −80 to 80 degrees. They could be turned at about 25 degrees per second. The mounts were directed by four Mark 37 fire control systems primarily through remote power control (RPC).


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The 5-inch/38 gun functioned as a dual purpose gun (DP); that is, it was able to fire at both surface and air targets with a reasonable degree of success. However, this did not mean that it possessed inferior anti-air abilities. As proven during 1941 gunnery tests conducted aboard the gun could consistently shoot down aircraft flying at , twice the effective range of the earlier single purpose 5-inch/25 caliber AA gun. As Japanese airplanes became faster, the gun lost some of its effectiveness in the anti-aircraft role; however, toward the end of the war its usefulness as an anti-aircraft weapon increased again because of an upgrade to the Mark 37 Fire Control System, Mark 1A computer, and proximity-fused shells.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The 5-inch/38 gun would remain on the battleships for the ships' entire service life; however, the total number of guns and gun mounts was reduced from twenty guns in ten mounts to twelve guns in six mounts during the 1980s' modernization of the four "Iowa"s. The removal of four of the gun mounts was required for the battleships to be outfitted with the armored box launchers needed to carry and fire Tomahawk missiles. At the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, these guns had been largely relegated to littoral defense for the battleships. Since each battleship carried a small detachment of Marines aboard, the Marines would man one of the 5-inch gun mounts.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: At the time of their commissioning, all four of the "Iowa"-class battleships were equipped with 20 quad 40 mm mounts and 49 single 20 mm mounts. These guns were respectively augmented with the Mk 14 range sight and Mk 51 fire control system to improve accuracy.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The Oerlikon gun, one of the most heavily produced anti-aircraft guns of the Second World War, entered service in 1941 and replaced the M2 Browning MG on a one-for-one basis. Between December 1941 and September 1944, 32% of all Japanese aircraft downed were credited to this weapon, with the high point being 48.3% for the second half of 1942; however, the 20 mm guns were found to be ineffective against the Japanese Kamikaze attacks used during the latter half of World War II and were subsequently phased out in favor of the heavier Bofors AA gun.<ref name="NavWeaps 20mm/70"></ref>


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: When the "Iowa"-class battleships were commissioned in 1943 and 1944, they carried twenty quad 40 mm AA gun mounts, which they used for defense against enemy aircraft. These heavy AA guns were also employed in the protection of allied aircraft carriers operating in the Pacific Theater of World War II, and accounted for roughly half of all Japanese aircraft shot down between 1 October 1944 and 1 February 1945.<ref name="NavWeaps 40mm/56"></ref><ref name="NavWeaps 3/50"></ref> Although successful in this role against WWII aircraft, the 40 mm guns were stripped from the battleships in the jet age – initially from "New Jersey" when reactivated in 1968 and later from "Iowa", "Missouri," and "Wisconsin" when they were reactivated for service in the 1980s.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The powerplant of the "Iowa"s consists of eight Babcock & Wilcox boilers and four sets of double reduction cross-compound geared turbines, with each turbine set driving a single shaft. Specifically, the geared turbines on "Iowa" and "Missouri" were provided by General Electric, while the equivalent machinery on "New Jersey" and "Wisconsin" was provided by Westinghouse. The plant produced and propelled the ship up to a maximum speed of at full load displacement and at normal displacement. The ships carried of fuel oil which gave a range of at . Two semi-balanced rudders gave the ships a tactical turning diameter of at and at .


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The machinery spaces were longitudinally divided into eight compartments with alternating fire and engine rooms to ensure adequate isolation of machinery components. Four fire rooms each contained two M-Type boilers operating at with a maximum superheater outlet temperature of . The double-expansion engines consist of a high-pressure (HP) turbine and a low-pressure (LP) turbine. The steam is first passed through the HP turbine which turns at up to 2,100 rpm. The steam, largely depleted at this point, is then passed through a large conduit to the LP turbine. By the time it reaches the LP turbine, it has no more than of pressure left. The LP turbine increases efficiency and power by extracting the last little bit of energy from the steam. After leaving the LP turbine, the exhaust steam passes into a condenser and is then returned as feed water to the boilers. Water lost in the process is replaced by three evaporators, which can make a total of 60,000 US gallons per day (3 liters per second) of fresh water. After the boilers have had their fill, the remaining fresh water is fed to the ship's potable water systems for drinking, showers, hand washing, cooking, etc. All of the urinals and all but one of the toilets on the "Iowa" class flush with saltwater in order to conserve fresh water. The turbines, especially the HP turbine, can turn at 2,000 rpm; their shafts drive through reduction gearing that turns the propeller shafts at speeds up to 225 rpm, depending upon the desired speed of the ship. The "Iowa"s were outfitted with four screws: the outboard pair consisting of four-bladed propellers in diameter and inboard pair consisting of five-bladed propellers in diameter. The propeller designs were adopted after earlier testing had determined that propeller cavitation caused a drop in efficiency at speeds over . The two inner shafts were housed in skegs to smooth the flow of water to the propellers and improve the structural strength of the stern.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Each of the four engine rooms has a pair of 1,250 kW Ship's Service Turbine Generators (SSTGs), providing the ship with a total non-emergency electrical power of 10,000 kW at 450 volts alternating current. Additionally, the vessels have a pair of 250 kW emergency diesel generators. To allow battle-damaged electrical circuits to be repaired or bypassed, the lower decks of the ship have a Casualty Power System whose large 3-wire cables and wall outlets called "biscuits" can be used to reroute power.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The earliest search radars installed were the SK air-search radar and SG surface-search radar during World War II. They were located on the mainmast and forward fire-control tower of the battleships, respectively. As the war drew to a close, the United States introduced the SK-2 air-search radar and SG surface-search radar; the "Iowa" class was updated to make use of these systems between 1945 and 1952. At the same time, the ships' radar systems were augmented with the installation of the SP height finder on the main mast. In 1952, AN/SPS-10 surface-search radar and AN/SPS-6 air-search radar replaced the SK and SG radar systems, respectively. Two years later the SP height finder was replaced by the AN/SPS-8 height finder, which was installed on the main mast of the battleships.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In addition to these search and navigational radars, the "Iowa" class were also outfitted with a variety of fire control radars for their gun systems. Beginning with their commissioning, the battleships made use of a pair Mk 38 gun fire control systems with Mark 8 fire control radar to direct the 16-inch guns and a quartet of Mk 37 gun fire control systems with Mark 12 fire control radar and Mark 22 height finding radar to direct the 5-inch gun batteries. These systems were upgraded over time with the Mark 13 replacing the Mark 8 and the Mark 25 replacing the Mark 12/22, but remained the cornerstones of the combat radar systems on the "Iowa" class during their careers. The range estimation of these gunfire control systems provided a significant accuracy advantage over earlier ships with optical rangefinders; this was demonstrated off Truk Atoll on 16 February 1944, when the "Iowa" engaged the at a range of and straddled her, setting the record for the longest-ranged straddle in history.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In World War II, the electronic countermeasures (ECM) included the SPT-1 and SPT-4 equipment; passive electronic support measures (ESM) were a pair of DBM radar direction finders and three intercept receiving antennas, while the active components were the TDY-1 jammers located on the sides of the fire control tower. The ships were also equipped with the Mark III identification, friend or foe (IFF) system, which were replaced by the Mark X when the ships were overhauled in 1955. When the "New Jersey" was reactivated in 1968 for the Vietnam War, she was outfitted with the ULQ-6 ECM system.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Like all battleships, the "Iowa"s carried heavy armor protection against shellfire and bombs with significant underwater protection against torpedoes. The "Iowa"s "all-or-nothing" armor scheme was largely modeled on that of the preceding "South Dakota" class, and designed to give a zone of immunity against fire from 16-inch/45-caliber guns between away. The protection system consists of Class A face-hardened Krupp cemented (K.C.) armor and Class B homogeneous Krupp-type armor; furthermore, special treatment steel (STS), a high-tensile structural steel with armor properties comparable to Class B, was extensively used in the hull plating to increase protection.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The citadel consisting of the magazines and engine rooms were protected by an STS outer hull plating thick and a Class A armor belt thick mounted on STS backing plate; the armor belt is sloped at 19 degrees, equivalent to of vertical class B armor at 19,000 yards. The armor belt extends to the triple bottom, where the Class B lower portion tapers to . The ends of the armored citadel are closed by vertical Class A transverse bulkheads for "Iowa" and "New Jersey". The transverse bulkhead armor on "Missouri" and "Wisconsin" was increased to ; this extra armor provided protection from raking fire directly ahead, which was considered more likely given the high speed of the "Iowa"s. The deck armor consists of a STS weather deck, a combined Class B and STS main armor deck, and a STS splinter deck. Over the magazines, the splinter deck is replaced by a STS third deck that separates the magazine from the main armored deck. The powder magazine rooms are separated from the turret platforms by a pair of 1.5-inch STS annular bulkheads under the barbettes for flashback protection. The installation of armor on the "Iowa"s also differed from those of earlier battleships in that the armor was installed while the ships were still "on the way" rather than after the ships had been launched.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa"s had heavily protected main battery turrets, with Class B and STS face, Class A sides, Class A rear, and Class B roof. The turret barbettes' armor is Class A with abeam and facing the centerline, extending down to the main armor deck. The conning tower armor is Class B with on all sides and on the roof. The secondary battery turrets and handling spaces were protected by of STS. The propulsion shafts and steering gear compartment behind the citadel had considerable protection, with Class A side strake and roof.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The armor's immunity zone shrank considerably against guns equivalent to their own 16-inch/50-caliber guns armed with the Mk. 8 armor-piercing shell due to the weapon's increased muzzle velocity and improved shell penetration; increasing the armor would have increased weight and reduced speed, a compromise that the General Board was not willing to make.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa"s' torpedo defense was based on the "South Dakota"s' design, with modifications to address shortcomings discovered during caisson tests. The system is an internal "bulge" that consists of four longitudinal torpedo bulkheads behind the outer hull plating with a system depth of to absorb the energy of a torpedo warhead. The extension of the armor belt to the triple bottom, where it tapers to a thickness of , serves as one of the torpedo bulkheads and was hoped to add to protection; the belt's lower edge was welded to the triple bottom structure and the joint was reinforced with buttstraps due to the slight knuckle causing a structural discontinuity. The torpedo bulkheads were designed to elastically deform to absorb energy and the two outer compartments were liquid loaded in order to disrupt the gas bubble and slow fragments. The outer hull was intended to detonate a torpedo, with the outer two liquid compartments absorbing the shock and slowing any splinters or debris while the lower armored belt and the empty compartment behind it absorb any remaining energy. However, the Navy discovered in caisson tests in 1939 that the initial design for this torpedo defense system was actually "less" effective than the previous design used on the "North Carolina"s' due to the rigidity of the lower armor belt causing the explosion to significantly displace the final holding bulkhead inwards despite remaining watertight. To mitigate the effects, the third deck and triple bottom structure behind the lower armor belt were reinforced and the placement of brackets was changed. "Iowa"s' system was also improved over the "South Dakota"s' through closer spacing of the transverse bulkheads, greater thickness of the lower belt at the triple bottom joint, and increased total volume of the "bulge". The system was further modified for the last two ships of the class, "Illinois" and "Kentucky", by eliminating knuckles along certain bulkheads; this was estimated to improve the strength of the system by as much as 20%.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Based on costly lessons in the Pacific theater, concerns were raised about the ability of the armor on these battleships to withstand aerial bombing, particularly high altitude bombing using armor piercing bombs. Developments such as the Norden bombsight further fueled these concerns. While the design of the "Iowa"s was too far along to adequately address this issue, experience in the Pacific theater eventually demonstrated that high altitude unguided bombing was ineffective against maneuvering warships.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: When they were commissioned during World War II, the "Iowa"-class battleships came equipped with two aircraft catapults designed to launch floatplanes. Initially, the "Iowa"s carried the Vought OS2U Kingfisher and Curtiss SC Seahawk, both of which were employed to spot for the battleship's main gun batteries – and, in a secondary capacity, perform search-and-rescue missions.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: By the time of the Korean War, helicopters had replaced floatplanes and the Sikorsky HO3S-1 helicopter was employed. "New Jersey" made use of the Gyrodyne QH-50 DASH drone for her Vietnam war deployment in 1968–69.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa" class were the only battleships with the speed required for post-war operations based around fast aircraft carrier task forces. There were a number of proposals in the early Cold War to convert the class to take into account changes in technology and doctrine. These included plans to equip the class with nuclear missiles, add aircraft capability and – in the case of "Illinois" and "Kentucky" – a proposal to rebuild both as aircraft carriers instead of battleships.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Initially, the "Iowa" class was to consist of only four battleships with hull numbers BB-61 to BB-64: "Iowa", "New Jersey", "Missouri", and "Wisconsin". However, changing priorities during World War II resulted in the battleship hull numbers BB-65 and BB-66 being reordered as "Illinois" and "Kentucky" respectively; "Montana" and "Ohio" were reassigned to hull numbers BB-67 and BB-68. At the time these two battleships were to be built a proposal was put forth to have them constructed as aircraft carriers rather than fast battleships. The plan called for the ships to be rebuilt to include a flight deck and an armament suite similar to that placed aboard the s that were at the time under construction in the United States. Ultimately, nothing came of the design proposal to rebuild these two ships as aircraft carriers and they were cleared for construction as fast battleships to conform to the "Iowa"-class design, though they differed from the earlier four that were built. Eventually, the light cruisers were selected for the aircraft-carrier conversion. Nine of these light cruisers would be rebuilt as light aircraft carriers.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: After the surrender of the Empire of Japan, construction on "Illinois" and "Kentucky" stopped. "Illinois" was eventually scrapped, but "Kentucky"s construction had advanced enough that several plans were proposed to complete "Kentucky" as a guided missile battleship (BBG) by removing the aft turret and installing a missile system. A similar conversion had already been performed on the battleship (BB-41/AG-128) to test the RIM-2 Terrier missile after World War II. One such proposal came from Rear Admiral W.K. Mendenhall, Chairman of the Ship Characteristics Board (SCB); Mendenhall proposed a plan that called for $15–30 million to be spent to allow "Kentucky" to be completed as a guided-missile battleship (BBG) carrying eight SSM-N-8 Regulus II guided missiles with a range of . He also suggested Terrier or RIM-8 Talos launchers to supplement the AA guns and proposed nuclear (instead of conventional) shells for the 16-inch guns. This never materialized, and "Kentucky" was ultimately sold for scrap in 1958, although her bow was used to repair her sister "Wisconsin" after a collision on 6 May 1956, earning her the nickname "WisKy".


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In 1954, the Long Range Objectives Group of the United States Navy suggested converting the "Iowa"-class ships to BBGs. In 1958, the Bureau of Ships offered a proposal based on this idea. This replaced the 5- and 16-inch gun batteries with "two Talos twin missile systems, two RIM-24 Tartar twin missile systems, an RUR-5 ASROC antisubmarine missile launcher, and a Regulus II installation with four missiles", as well as flagship facilities, sonar, helicopters, and fire-control systems for the Talos and Tartar missiles. In addition to these upgrades, of additional fuel oil was also suggested to serve in part as ballast for the battleships and for use in refueling destroyers and cruisers. Due to the estimated cost of the overhaul ($178–193 million) this proposal was rejected as too expensive; instead, the SCB suggested a design with one Talos, one Tartar, one ASROC and two Regulus launchers and changes to the superstructure, at a cost of up to $85 million. This design was later revised to accommodate the Polaris Fleet Ballistic Missile, which in turn resulted in a study of two schemes by the SCB. In the end, none of these proposed conversions for the battleships were ever authorized. Interest in converting the "Iowa"s into guided-missile battleships began to deteriorate in 1960, because the hulls were considered too old and the conversion costs too high. Nonetheless, additional conversion proposals – including one to install the AN/SPY-1 Aegis Combat System radar on the battleships – were suggested in 1962, 1974 and 1977, but as before, these proposals failed to gain the needed authorization. This was due, in part, to the possibility that sensitive electronics within of any 16-inch gun muzzle may be damaged from overpressure.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president on a promise to build up the U.S. military as a response to the increasing military power of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Navy was commissioning the "Kirov" class of missile cruisers, the largest type of surface warship built since World War II (other than aircraft carriers or amphibious assault vessels). As part of Reagan's 600-ship Navy policy and as a counter to the "Kirov" class, the U.S. Navy began reactivating the four "Iowa"-class units and modernizing them for service.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The Navy considered several proposals that would have removed the aft 16-inch turret. Martin Marietta proposed to replace the turret with servicing facilities for 12 AV-8B Harrier STOVL jumpjets. Charles Myers, a former Navy test pilot turned Pentagon consultant, proposed replacing the turret with vertical launch systems for missiles and a flight deck for Marine helicopters. An article


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Each battleship was overhauled to burn navy distillate fuel and modernized to carry electronic warfare suites, close-in weapon systems (CIWS) for self-defense, and missiles. The obsolete electronics and anti-aircraft armament were removed to make room for more modern systems. The Navy spent about $1.7 billion, from 1981 through 1988, to modernize and reactivate the four "Iowa"-class battleships, roughly the same as building four s.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The modernized battleships operated as centerpieces of their own battle group (termed as a Battleship Battle Group or Surface Action Group), consisting of one , one or , one , three s and one support ship, such as a fleet oiler.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: During their modernization in the 1980s each "Iowa" was equipped with four of the US Navy's Phalanx CIWS mounts, two of which sat just behind the bridge and two which were next to the after ship's funnel. "Iowa", "New Jersey", and "Missouri" were equipped with the Block 0 version of the Phalanx, while "Wisconsin" received the first operational Block 1 version in 1988. The Phalanx system is intended to serve as a last line of defense against enemy missiles and aircraft, and when activated can engage a target with a 20 mm M61 Vulcan 6-barreled Gatling cannon at a distance of approximately .


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: As part of their modernization in the 1980s, each of the "Iowa"s received a complement of quad cell Armored Box Launchers and "shock hardened" Mk. 141 quad cell launchers. The former was used by the battleships to carry and fire the BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) for use against enemy targets on land, while the latter system enabled the ships to carry a complement of RGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles for use against enemy ships. With an estimated range of for the Tomahawks and for the Harpoons, these two missile systems displaced the 16-inch guns and their maximum range of to become the longest-ranged weapons on the battleships during the 1980s. It has been alleged by members of the environmental group Greenpeace that the battleships carried the TLAM-A (also cited, incorrectly, as the TLAM-N) – a Tomahawk missile with a variable yield W80 nuclear warhead – during their 1980s service with the United States Navy, but owing to the United States Navy's policy of refusing to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weaponry aboard its ships, these claims can not be conclusively proved. Between 2010 and 2013, the U.S. withdrew the BGM-109A, leaving only conventional munitions packages for its Tomahawk missile inventory, though the Iowas had been withdrawn from service at that point.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Owing to the original 1938 design of the battleships, the Tomahawk missiles could not be fitted to the "Iowa" class unless the battleships were rebuilt in such a way as to accommodate the missile mounts that would be needed to store and launch the Tomahawks. This realization prompted the removal of the anti-aircraft guns previously installed on the "Iowa"s and the removal of four of each of the battleships' ten 5-inch/38 DP mounts. The mid and aft end of the battleships were then rebuilt to accommodate the missile launchers. At one point, the NATO Sea Sparrow was to be installed on the reactivated battleships; however, it was determined that the system could not withstand the overpressure effects from firing the main battery. To supplement the anti-aircraft capabilities of the "Iowa"s, five FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missile firing positions were installed. These secured the shoulder-launched weapons and their rounds for ready use by the crew.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: During their modernization under the 600-ship Navy program, the "Iowa"-class battleships' radar systems were again upgraded. The AN/SPS-6 air-search radar system was replaced with the AN/SPS-49 radar set (which also augmented the existing navigation capabilities on the battleships), and the AN/SPS-8 surface-search radar set was replaced by the AN/SPS-67 search radar.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: By the Korean War, jet engines had replaced propellers on aircraft, which severely limited the ability of the 20 mm and 40 mm AA batteries and their gun systems to track and shoot down enemy planes. Consequently, the AA guns and their associated fire-control systems were removed when reactivated. "New Jersey" received this treatment in 1967, and the others followed in their 1980s modernizations. In the 1980s, each ship also received a quartet of Phalanx Close in Weapon System (CIWS) mounts which made use of a radar system to locate incoming enemy projectiles and destroy them with a 20 mm Gatling gun before they could strike the ship.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: With the added missile capacity of the battleships in the 1980s came additional fire-support systems to launch and guide the ordnance. To fire the Harpoon anti-ship missiles, the battleships were equipped with the SWG-1 fire-control system, and to fire the Tomahawk missiles the battleships used either the SWG-2 or SWG-3 fire-control system. In addition to these offensive-weapon systems, the battleships were outfitted with the AN/SLQ-25 Nixie to be used as a lure against enemy torpedoes, an SLQ-32 electronic warfare system that can detect, jam, and deceive an opponent's radar and a Mark 36 SRBOC system to fire chaff rockets intended to confuse enemy missiles.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Aside from the electronics added for weaponry control, all four battleships were outfitted with a communications suite used by both cruisers and guided missile cruisers in service at the time. This communication suite included the OE-82 antenna for satellite communications, but did not include the Naval Tactical Data System.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: During the 1980s these battleships made use of the RQ-2 Pioneer, an unmanned aerial vehicle employed in spotting for the guns. Launched from the fantail using a rocket-assist booster that was discarded shortly after takeoff, the Pioneer carried a video camera in a pod under the belly of the aircraft which transmitted live video to the ship so operators could observe enemy actions or fall of shot during naval gunnery. To land the UAV a large net was deployed at the back of the ship; the aircraft was flown into it. "Missouri" and "Wisconsin" both used the Pioneer UAVs successfully during Operation Desert Storm, and in one particularly memorable incident, a Pioneer UAV operated by "Wisconsin" received the surrender of Iraqi troops during combat operations. This particular Pioneer was later donated to the Smithsonian Institution, and is now on public display. During Operation Desert Storm these Pioneers were operated by detachments of VC-6. In addition to the Pioneer UAVs, the recommissioned "Iowa"s could support six types of helicopters: the Sikorsky HO3S-1, UH-1 Iroquois, SH-2 Seasprites, CH-46 Sea Knight, CH-53 Sea Stallion and the LAMPS III SH-60B Seahawk.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Following the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States Navy began to decommission and mothball many of the ships it had brought out of its reserve fleet in the drive to attain a 600-ship Navy. At the height of Navy Secretary John F. Lehman's 600-ship Navy plan, nearly 600 ships of all types were active within the Navy. This included fifteen aircraft carriers, four battleships and over 100 submarines, along with various other types of ships the overall plan specified. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the Navy sought to return to its traditional, 313-ship composition. While reducing the fleet created under the 600-ship Navy program, the decision was made to deactivate the four recommissioned "Iowa"-class battleships and return them to the reserve fleet.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In 1995, the decommissioned battleships were removed from the "Naval Vessel Register" after it was determined by ranking US Navy officials that there was no place for a battleship in the modern navy. In response to the striking of the battleships from the "Naval Vessel Register" a movement began to reinstate the battleships, on the grounds that these vessels had superior firepower over the 5-inch guns found on the , , and s, and s. Citing concern over the lack of available gunfire to support amphibious operations, Congress required the Navy to reinstate two battleships to the "Naval Vessel Register" and maintain them with the mothball fleet, until the Navy could certify it had gunfire support within the current fleet that would meet or exceed the battleship's capability.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The debate over battleships in the modern navy continued until 2006, when the two reinstated battleships were stricken after naval officials submitted a two-part plan that called for the near-term goal of increasing the range of the guns in use on the "Arleigh Burke"-class destroyers with new Extended Range Guided Munition (ERGM) ammunition intended to allow a 5-inch projectile fired from these guns to travel an estimated inland. The long-term goal called for the replacement of the two battleships with 32 vessels of the of guided-missile destroyers. Cost overruns caused the class to be reduced to three ships. These ships are outfitted with an Advanced Gun System (AGS) that was to fire specially developed 6-inch Long Range Land Attack Projectiles for shore bombardment;. LRLAP procurement was cancelled in 2017 and the AGS is unusable. The long-term goal for the "Zumwalt" class is to have the ships mount railguns or free-electron lasers.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: The "Iowa" class became culturally symbolic in the United States in many different ways, to the point where certain elements of the American public – such as the United States Naval Fire Support Association – were unwilling to part with the battleships, despite their apparent obsolescence in the face of modern naval combat doctrine that places great emphasis on air supremacy and missile firepower. Although all were officially stricken from the "Naval Vessel Register" they were spared scrapping and were donated for use as museum ships.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: Their service records added to their fame, ranging from their work as carrier escorts in World War II to their shore bombardment duties in North Korea, North Vietnam, and the Middle East, as well as their service in the Cold War against the expanded Soviet Navy. Their reputation combined with the stories told concerning the firepower of these battleships' 16-inch guns were such that when they were brought out of retirement in the 1980s in response to increased Soviet Naval activity – and in particular, in response to the commissioning of the s – the United States Navy was inundated with requests from former sailors pleading for a recall to active duty so they could serve aboard one of the battleships.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: In part because of the service length and record of the class, members have made numerous appearances in television shows, video games, movies, and other media, including appearances of the "Kentucky" and "Illinois" in the anime series "Neon Genesis Evangelion", the History Channel documentary series "Battle 360: USS Enterprise", the Discovery Channel documentary "The Top 10 Fighting Ships" (where the "Iowa" class was rated Number 1), the book turned movie "A Glimpse of Hell", the 1989 music video for the song by Cher "If I Could Turn Back Time", the 1992 film "Under Siege", the 2012 film "Battleship", among other appearances. Japanese rock band Vamps performed the finale of their 2009 US tour on board "Missouri" on 19 September 2009.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: When brought into service during the final years of World War II, the "Iowa"-class battleships were assigned to operate in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. By this point in the war, aircraft carriers had displaced battleships as the primary striking arm of both the United States Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy. As a result of this shift in tactics, U.S. fast battleships of all classes were relegated to the secondary role of carrier escorts and assigned to the Fast Carrier Task Force to provide anti-aircraft screening for U.S. aircraft carriers and perform shore bombardment. Three were recalled to service in the 1950s with the outbreak of the Korean War, and provided naval artillery support for U.N. forces for the entire duration of the war before being returned to mothballs in 1955 after hostilities ceased. In 1968, to help alleviate U.S. air losses over North Vietnam, "New Jersey" was summoned to Vietnam, but was decommissioned a year after arriving. All four returned in the 1980s during the drive for a 600-ship Navy to counter the new Soviet s, only to be retired after the collapse of the Soviet Union on the grounds that they were too expensive to maintain.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: "Iowa" was ordered 1 July 1939, laid down 27 June 1940, launched 27 August 1942, and commissioned 22 February 1943. She conducted a shakedown cruise in Chesapeake Bay before sailing to Naval Station Argentia, Newfoundland, to be ready in case the entered the Atlantic. Transferred to the Pacific Fleet in 1944, "Iowa" made her combat debut in February and participated in the campaign for the Marshall Islands. The ship later escorted U.S. aircraft carriers conducting air raids in the Marianas campaign, and then was present at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. During the Korean War, "Iowa" bombarded enemy targets at Songjin, Hŭngnam, and Kojo, North Korea. "Iowa" returned to the US for operational and training exercises before being decommissioned on 24 February 1958. Reactivated in the early 1980s, "Iowa" operated in the Atlantic Fleet, cruising in North American and European waters for most of the decade and participating in joint military exercises with European ships. On 19 April 1989, 47 sailors were killed following an explosion in her No. 2 turret. In 1990, "Iowa" was decommissioned for the last time and placed in the mothball fleet. She was stricken from the "Naval Vessel Register" on 17 March 2006. "Iowa" was anchored as part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet in Suisun Bay, California until October 2011, when she was towed from her mooring to Richmond, California for renovation as a museum ship. She was towed from Richmond in the San Francisco Bay on 26 May 2012, to San Pedro at the Los Angeles Waterfront to serve as a museum ship run by Pacific Battleship Center and opened to the public on 7 July 2012.


title: Iowa-class battleship

text: "New Jersey" was ordered 4 July 1939, laid down 16 September 1940, launched 7 December 1942, and commissioned 23 May 1943. "New Jersey" completed fitting out and trained her initial crew in the Western Atlantic and Caribbean before transferring to the Pacific Theatre in advance of the planned assault on the Marshall Islands, where she screened the U.S. fleet of aircraft carriers from enemy air raids. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the ship protected carriers with her anti-aircraft guns. "New Jersey" then bombarded Iwo Jima and Okinawa. During the Korean War, the ship pounded targets at Wonsan, Yangyang, and Kansong. Following the , "New Jersey" conducted training and operation cruises until she was decommissioned on 21 August 1957. Recalled to duty in 1968, "New Jersey" reported to the gunline off the Vietnamese coast, and shelled North Vietnamese targets before departing the line in December 1968. She was decommissioned the following year. Reactivated in 1982 under the 600-ship Navy program, "New Jersey" was sent to Lebanon to protect U.S. interests and U.S. Marines, firing her main guns at Druze and Syrian positions in the Beqaa Valley east of Beirut. Decommissioned for the last time 8 February 1991, "New Jersey" was briefly retained on the "Naval Vessel Register" before being donated to the Home Port Alliance of Camden, New Jersey for use as a museum ship in October 2001.