10 Gargantuan Things Made Solely For Killing People

When you want the world to know who's in charge, you could do a lot worse than blow $4.5 billion on a ship so huge it qualifies as a small town, then stock it with multiple fighter aircraft, bombers, and helicopters. If you want to really flaunt that military swag, do it nine more times and name most of them after your presidents. This is the formula the USA followed starting in 1975 with the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, and if you don't like it then you might just be a communist.

A Nimitz-class is more than 330 metres long and almost 80 wide. These suckers are powered by a pair of nuclear reactors, carry anything up to 5,600 personnel and can happily sail around for more than 20 years before refuelling. If that doesn't sound sexy enough for you don't worry, the US has a brand new class of aircraft carriers, the Gerald R. Ford class, planned to replace them, so there's that to look forward to.