The Forgotten Nuclear Cruiser: Why the USS Long Beach Can’t Be Saved

She's still floating in Washington state. But there's almost nothing left to float. No bridge. No bow. No stern. No weapons. The first nuclear-powered surface warship in history now sits at a mooring in Puget Sound Naval Shipyard as a long gray rectangle of steel, with two defueled reactor plants still sealed inside. She was put up for scrap auction in July 2012. The same week, the battleship Iowa opened as a museum just up the coast in Los Angeles. Years later, Long Beach still hadn't gone anywhere. Then in 2015 the Navy carried out what it called a "hull preservation" job, and that job ended with her bow and stern cut off. In this video we cover the cruiser that went to sea in 1961 with no guns at all, until a presidential visit reportedly changed that. We cover the ship the Eisenhower White House approved to carry Polaris nuclear ballistic missiles, which never arrived. She sailed more than 30,000 miles around the world in 1964 without refueling once, alongside the carrier Enterprise. Her billboard-like radar sailors couldn't switch on near an airport. Her Talos missiles shot down MiGs over Vietnam. And she rescued 107 Vietnamese refugees from the South China Sea in 1980. Then we get to the real reason she can never come back. In 2025 the Navy ruled her ineligible for the National Register of Historic Places, saying she "does not evoke the aesthetic" of a 20th-century warship. The public comment period drew zero responses. Her structure is now too weak for an open-ocean tow, so she'll have to ride to the scrapyard on a barge or heavy-lift ship. Her reactor plants must be cut out and disposed of as radioactive waste. The contract to dismantle her is planned for 2027. The only nuclear warship sent down that commercial route before her was Enterprise, the same carrier that sailed beside her around the world. The answer to the title isn't money. It's that the ship you'd be reactivating no longer exists. 🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command — history.navy.mil Naval Sea Systems Command — navsea.navy.mil Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State — history.state.gov U.S. Department of Energy — energy.gov The War Zone (TWZ) — twz.com GlobalSecurity.org — globalsecurity.org #usslongbeach #nuclearnavy #navalhistory