On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 13:30:53 -0000, "John"
wrote:

Time of Flight of IRBM, 30 minutes. Speed of CVBG, 25 kts. Detection
of launch, instantaneous. DSP Sats, y'know. Radius of circle that
could contain the target - 12.5 Nautical Miles.

35 knots (let's be generous) and half an hour means a ship or convoy could
get 32410m away from the target point. This gives an area of
3,299,954,370m2. UK trident-II missiles can 8 475kT warheads which will
start fires at 9km, meaning they'll make the fuel onboard a carrier explode
within an area of 254,469,005m2.

That's start fires of flamable material left exposed in the open,
not inside a steel hull. You're going to need to be a lot closer than
that to ignite the fuel stored in a carrier. UK Trident missiles are
based on the W76 warhead, not the W88 warhead, and have a 100kt yield,
not 475kt.

US ships constructed after 1969 were specially designed to resist the
shockwave generated by a nuclear weapon. You could cause severe
damage to the ship out to 1.8 nm or so. To sink it you would need to
be close enough destroy the ship through overpressure by being within
..8 nm or so. If you are close enough for the thermal pulse to burn
through the hull to ignite the fuel the shockwave would rip the ship
apart.

If you wanted to guarantee a kill by being within .8 nm or so it
would take about 400 warheads to cover all the ocean a 32 knot carrier
could reach in 30 minutes. Catching it within 1.8 nm by two different
warheads and could sink the ship from flooding and only take you 160
warheads or so; but this wouldn't be 100% certain.

Sure, it's possible that you can take out a CVBG with a shotgun nuke
approach, but it would take the UK 35% of it's missiles and 80% of
it's warheads to be reasonably sure of success.

--
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft