I'm not recommending that we bring back the battleships. They are simply too expensive and require too large a crew to operate. Yes, they are impressive but how much should we pay for impressive?
As far as vulnerability, I don't know of any existing non-nuclear missiles that are capable of seriously damaging a battleship. They are simply not going to penetrate 16 inches of armor. I think the decks are 4 inches of armor but even then a lot of the force would be disapated.
Today's missiles are designed to destroy todays non-armored ships. When they operated most recently, the existence of battleships in our active fleet posed a problem for our enemies because they simply had nothing in the inventory that could defeat battleship armor.
They are vulnerable to torpedos but even then their size makes them significantly harder to destroy than any other modern ship. And, the Iowa class are very fast, at 33 knots.
Senior Chief Firecontrolman(SW) USN(Ret)
Nam Vet