As part of President
Ronald Reagan and
Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman's efforts to create an expanded
600-ship Navy,
Iowa was reactivated in 1982 and towed by
USNS Apache to
Avondale Shipyard near
New Orleans, Louisiana, for refitting and equipment modernization in advance of her planned recommissioning.
Iowa was then towed to
Ingalls Shipbuilding in
Pascagoula, Mississippi, Also included in her modernization were upgrades to
radar and
fire-control systems for her guns and missiles, and improved
electronic warfare capabilities.
Shakedown and NATO exercises (1984–1989) From April to August 1984,
Iowa underwent refresher training and naval gunfire support qualifications at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Puerto Rican operating area. After a short period in her new home port of Norfolk, Virginia, she spent the two times during the rest of 1984 and early 1985 conducting "presence" operations shakedown in the area around Central America. During this time she transited the Panama Canal to operate off the west coast of Central America while also conducting people-to-people humanitarian operations, including in El Salvador,
Costa Rica and
Honduras, before returning to the United States in April 1985 for a period of routine maintenance. In October, she took part in Baltic operations, and fired her phalanx guns, guns, and guns in the
Baltic Sea on 17 October while operating with US and other allied ships. After these operations during which she visited Le Havre in France, Kiel in Germany, Copenhagen (where the current King of Denmark visited the ship as a schoolboy) and Aarhus in Denmark, and Oslo in Norway, where the King of Norway was entertained at lunch, she returned to the United States. Afterward,
Iowa returned to the waters around Central America and conducted drills and exercises, while providing a military presence to friendly nations. On 4 July, President Ronald Reagan and
First Lady Nancy Reagan boarded
Iowa for the International Naval Review, which was held in the
Hudson River. On 25 April, Captain
Larry Ray Seaquist assumed command of the battleship and her crew during Naval Gunfire Support requalification off Vieques Island near Puerto Rico. UAV aboard
Iowa. On 17 August,
Iowa set sail for the North Atlantic and in September she participated in Exercise Northern Wedding by ferrying
Marines ashore and assisting helicopter gunships. During the exercise,
Iowa fired her main guns at
Cape Wrath range in Scotland in support of a simulated amphibious assault on 5–6 September, firing a total of 19 shells and 32 shells during a 10-hour period and operating in rough seas. During the live-fire exercise, a small number of
Iowa Marines were put ashore to monitor the fall of shot and advise the battleship of gunnery corrections. Afterward,
Iowa visited ports, including Portsmouth in England, and Germany, before returning to the United States in October. In December, the ship became the testbed for the Navy's RQ-2 Pioneer (UAV). The drone was designed to serve as an aerial spotter for the battleship's guns, thereby allowing the guns to be used against an enemy without the need for an airplane or helicopter spotter. Pioneer passed its tests and made its first deployment that same month aboard
Iowa. whose ships were being raided by Iranian forces who were attempting to cut off weapons shipments from the United States and Europe to
Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, via Kuwaiti territory. This phase of the war was later called the "
Tanker War" phase of the Iran–Iraq War.
Iowa and other vessels operating in the gulf were assigned to escort Kuwaiti tankers from Kuwaiti ports to the open sea, but because US law forbade military escorts for civilian ships flying a foreign flag, the tankers escorted by the United States were reflagged as US merchant vessels and assigned American names. After the overhaul, Moosally took
Iowa on a shakedown cruise around Chesapeake Bay on 25 August. Encountering difficulty in conning the ship through shallow water, Moosally narrowly missed colliding with the
frigate , destroyer , and cruiser before running aground in soft mud outside the bay's main ship channel near the Thimble Shoals. After one hour,
Iowa was able to extricate herself without damage and return to port.
Iowa continued with sea trials throughout August and September, then began refresher training in the waters around Florida and Puerto Rico in October, during which the ship passed an Operation Propulsion Program evaluation. On 20 January 1989, during an improperly authorized gunnery experiment off
Vieques Island,
Iowa fired a shell , setting a record for the longest-ranged shell ever fired. In February, the battleship sailed for New Orleans for a port visit before departing for Norfolk. On 10 April, the battleship was visited by the commander of the
2nd Fleet, and on 13 April, she sailed to participate in a fleet exercise.
1989 turret explosion During a gunnery exercise, at 0955 on 19 April 1989, an explosion ripped through the Number Two gun turret, killing 47 crewmen. A gunner's mate in the powder magazine room quickly flooded the No. 2 powder magazine, likely preventing catastrophic damage to the ship. At first,
Naval Investigative Service (NIS, later renamed Naval Criminal Investigative Service or NCIS) investigators theorized that one of the dead crewmen, Clayton Hartwig, had detonated an explosive device in a suicide attempt after the end of an alleged affair with another sailor. To support this claim, naval officials pointed to several different factors, including Hartwig's life insurance policy, which named Kendall Truitt as the sole beneficiary in the event of his death, the presence of unexplained materials inside turret 2, and his mental state, which was alleged to be unstable. Although the Navy was satisfied with the investigation and its results, but it did uncover evidence pointing to an accidental powder explosion due to over-ramming rather than an intentional act of sabotage. While
Iowa was undergoing modernization in the early 1980s, her sister ship
New Jersey had been dispatched to Lebanon to provide offshore fire support. At the time,
New Jersey was the only commissioned battleship anywhere in the world, and in an effort to get another battleship commissioned to relieve
New Jersey, the modernization of
Iowa was stepped up, leaving her in poor condition when she recommissioned in 1984. Powder from the same lot as the one under investigation was tested at the
Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division.
Spontaneous combustion was achieved with the powder, which had been originally milled in the 1930s and improperly stored in a barge at the Navy's
Yorktown, Virginia, Naval Weapons Station during a 1988 dry-docking of
Iowa. This revelation resulted in a shift in the Navy's position on the incident, and Admiral
Frank Kelso, the chief of Naval Operations at the time, publicly apologized to the Hartwig family, concluding that no real evidence supported the claim that he had intentionally killed the other sailors.
Iowa captain Fred Moosally was severely criticized for his handling of the matter, and as a result of the incident, the Navy changed the powder-handling procedures for its battleships. ==Reserve Fleet and museum ship (1990–present)==