“Bottom line, if you can’t afford to keep the existing fleet at sea, where are you going to get the money to complete your first nuclear-powered supercarrier, a vessel that will demand even more manpower that you can’t afford?”
But
Russia now seems willing to revive its supercarrier dream. “The navy will have
an aircraft carrier,” Russian navy chief Adm. Viktor Chirkov recently said. “
The research companies are working on it.”
Other Russian media reports
indicate that designers are in
the early phases of planning a new carrier class that would be slightly larger than the Nimitz class — and capable of holding an air wing of 100 planes.