Also needs to be remembered that by the 1990s the newest of the Nuke Cruisers, the USS Arkansas, was already 10 years old.
The rest of Virginia class was pushing everywhere from 12, 13, and 14, years old going down the list.
While the California class were 16 and 15 by 1990.
Long Beach was 29 herself. And the other DLGNs were not much younger.
With those ships be built to the surface warship standard of 35 years of active use, not the carrier standard of 50 years. As seen by their 15 year refueling cycles for the California and Virginias.
And those ships were hard used as well.
Basically only the Virginia class had a chance in hell of serving past 2005 and even then they be likely decom in 2010.
According to Wikipedia, the Virginias were designed to last 38 years, and given advances in "zeroing" hull wear, they might have lasted even longer, if the investment was made. The major problem I can see with the Virginias though is that - aside from their pricetag and the price of refueling them - they were just strangely designed in general.
Let me count the ways the Virginias were weird:
1 - they were single-ended Terrier ships with all the radars at one end to start with.
2 - Swapping to Mk26 fore and aft and then adding a hull-mounted hangar appears to have flipped the missile launcher arrangement around so that the majority of the missiles were at the opposite end from its directors.
3 - the hangar, of course, didn't work and they had to weld it shut
4 - Despite having a big sonar and having been *designed* to carry helicopters, the scrapped hangar was replaced by two tomahawk launchers that blocked the helipad from being used, while the Californias which had very limited helo facilities kept their pads.
5 - it had two of the most rapid-fire launchers available at the time, but only two fire control channels to feed it.
Based on some statements in the Navy training publication about the Mk26 (the one that's linked in the wiki article), the Virginias *might* have at one point been destined to have a 44 round launcher forward and a 64-round launcher aft, but that never happened and the statement may be a typo. I'm not sure at this point. That
The Kidd class were equally weird, what with instead of having all the fire control systems facing aft, they split them equally forward and aft... but then the forward launcher, the one that was according to the design specs earmarked for ASROC, only has room for four Standard missiles.
Unless the Kidds routinely stored all their ASROCs in the aft launcher (which would be the smart thing) it would be limited greatly in rate of fire for Standard after the first two salvoes due to running out of missiles forward...