IN an age where aircraft are losing their edge to drones and missiles, Russia is spending big bucks on bringing back to life ships that were dinosaurs even before they were built.

During the Cold War, Russia built four 252m long, 28,000 ton monsters: Huge, heavily armoured ‘battlecruisers’ specifically designed to carry a cargo of high powered, long range missiles.

Their mission was to project power, to be a mobile nuclear missile base — and a hard-to-kill threat to the US Navy’s mighty aircraft carrier fleet.

When it came to gunboat diplomacy, these bristling ships were certainly a sight to behold.

With the collapse of Soviet Russia, most of these Kirov-class ships — being both expensive to crew and maintain — were mothballed.

Now they’re being brought back.

The Admiral Nakhimov nuclear missile battlecruiser is undergoing modernisation in the port of Severodvinsk. Russian media is now reporting the ship will be back in operation by late next year — with a suite of deadly new weapons.

Have times turned back in favour of these big, heavily protected and armed titans of the sea?

CONSIGNED TO HISTORY

Conventional thinking consigned capital ships such as the battleship, battlecruiser and heavy cruiser to the scrap heap after the bloody lessons of World War II.

Battleships, which ruled the waves during World War I, had still seemed impressive enough. They were faster than ever before. They were better protected than ever before. Their guns were bigger than ever before. They were intimidating.

But the unexpected power of aircraft soon up-ended that applecart.

A handful of rickety old biplanes managed to cripple Germany’s mightiest battleship, the Bismarck. Britain’s seemingly powerful battlefleet of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse was simply overwhelmed by wave after wave of Japanese bombers.

Without aircraft protecting them, battleships were vulnerable. But when they had aircraft protecting them, those same aircraft made battleships somewhat useless.

It wasn’t vulnerability that killed the battleship: Thin-skinned aircraft carriers have to carry heavy loads of fragile aircraft and flammable fuels.

RELATED: Could a carrier-equipped China cancel Christmas?

Instead, it was the short range and limited flexibility of their big guns that made battleships redundant.

Cold War criticism of Russia’s battlecruisers followed similar lines: Their missiles were simply not powerful or useful enough to justify the ship’s size and expense when pitted against the reach and flexibility of an aircraft carrier.

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN

The only battlecruiser to remain active in recent decades was Pyotr Veliky, the flagship of the Northern Fleet.

But an increasingly belligerent Moscow is determined to bring another back to life.

The Admiral Nakhimov is the third ship completed out of a batch of four guided missile battlecruisers built between 1980 and 1998. Nakhimov first entered service in 1988, but has been rusting in dock for the past 15 years.

Now pro-Putin news service Sputnik has said the ship is being ‘fast-tracked’ for launch late next year after extensive reconstruction and reconditioning.

Another of the class, Admiral Lazarev, is slated to be next.

Key among the upgrades will be the replacement of old missile systems with up to 80 new multipurpose vertical-launch modules, making the ship capable of carrying a wider variety of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles — and more of them.

It’s these missiles that are behind the idea of a battleship making a comeback.

EXPLORE MORE: Are aircraft carriers now obsolete?

Aircraft carriers, so long the world’s dominant weapons system, are appearing increasingly weak.

Their aircraft no longer hold the advantage of range: Many modern missiles and drones can fly both further and faster. So, in order to launch their punch, aircraft carriers must expose their vulnerable selves to their enemy.

This loss of reach, flexibility and safety is what killed the battleship before them.

Now, missile-armed battleships may be on the comeback trail.

RISE OF THE CARRIER-KILLER?

Among Admiral Nakhimov’s new arsenal are SS-N-27 Sizzler nuclear missiles. But key among its capabilities will be a whole new generation of anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons.

Its long-range S-400 ‘Triumf’ air defence system caused widespread concern among the Western coalition operating against Islamic State over Syria when Russia declared it had been deployed in retaliation for Turkey’s shooting down of one of its bombers.

It will also carry the family of ‘Club’ missiles. These are essentially cruise missiles, and some variants can fly at Mach 2.9 as they guide themselves towards targets up to 300km away.

But it’s the next-generation weapons that could ultimately make this ship a force to be reckoned with.

RELATED: India’s aircraft carrier choice stirs up a Storm

Russian military analyst Sergei Ischenko, writing recently in the newspaper Svobodnaya Pressa, made the claim that the Admiral Nakhimov will be equipped with one of the world’s first operational hypersonic missiles — the 3M22 ‘Zircon’.

These incredibly fast missiles, designed to be virtually impervious to defence systems, are intended to fly to the edge of space before plummeting back towards their targets in a ball of superheated plasma.

Such technology is being touted by Russia and China as being the ultimate ‘supercarrier killer’.

Their reliability and accuracy, however, remains in doubt after a string of failures. Keeping them stable at hypersonic speeds is proving more difficult than anticipated.

But rickety old biplanes were enough to hobble Bismark. And, like the biplanes, hypervelocity missiles will continue to evolve.

But Moscow’s big talk may not be matched by its wallet.

It this week announced it is considering a 5 per cent cut to its defence spending budget as international sanctions, triggered by its ‘velvet’ invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, begin to bite.

@JamieSeidel