US President Donald Trump’s vision of new warships bristling with huge-calibre guns – widely mocked as a billionaire’s vanity project and a throwback to the battleship era of the second world war – has received an unexpected nod from military scientists in China. In a paper published last month by the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Command Control & Simulation, the authors suggested that large-calibre naval guns could have a critical role in future warfare by countering the growing threat of...