Pretty specific question but I think I might be able to get an answer here. Big guns, actually all guns, from my understanding have a limited service life on the gun barrels. I've read descriptions of gunnery tests on battleship guns where shell targeting became inconsistent on worn out barrels. And the fix for this was to replace the barrel and sometimes the worn out one was sent back to the steel mill for relining.
Did the US Navy have plans when these ships were reactivated for replacing/refurbishing the barrels? Did that industrial capacity exist anymore?
The whole reason behind this thread was a debate I overheard where one of the participants claimed we no longer had the ability to manufacture the "greats of the past" such as the Saturn V rocket and then went into battleships and claimed that the steel mills necessary to forge the thick armor plates on Iowa class no longer existed. And by that logic I later on began to wonder if the support infrastructure for the guns/turrets was still around. Was this perhaps the reason when USS Iowa suffered her turret explosion, that the turret was never repaired?