Carrier battle groups are a formidable array of overlapping layers of defensive systems, and yet, it would take only one modest nuclear detonation to destroy the carrier, escort ships, and all assets and personnel aboard.
We know the Soviets had nuclear tipped torpedoes on their subs, and even developped a supercavitating 100mph+ supposedly unstoppable torpedo (the skval? skjal?)
It would still be relatively easy to mount a warhead on a sea-skimming missile that would not show up on radar till it was too late, and with a nuclear warhead, you could afford quite the stand-off detonation distance which would, presumably, be outside the range of the radar guided rotary cannons used to defend against conventional sea skimmers.
Yet in all the recreational reading I do dealing with carrier history, this topic never comes up.
It seems to me the carrier battle group is one big sitting duck. Yet, I’m sure there was a strategy and some tactics for this. Surely the cold war is far back enough that we can talk about this. What were they?
Was it just trying to intercept any and all potential launch platform on, over or under the water before they got into range?
Are the escort vessels constantly banging away on active sonar to make sure they find any enemy subs far away enough?
Or was it just part of the MAD coverage and we assume that if an entire battle group vanishes there are most likely enemy ICBMs in the air, at which point the fate of the carrier group is irrelevant?
Even in a conventional shooting war, the real battles would be between Soviet attack subs (both nuclear and diesel) trying to infiltrate the screen of a carrier battle group and the Allied (US/British) attack subs trying to defend same. If WW2 had been fought with 1980’s+ technology, carriers basically wouldn’t be around after a few months, nukes or no nukes. Big surface task forces are already obsolete, but only against an enemy which is on a level playing field; against Third World militaries they still have their uses.
Rear Admiral T.A. Brooks, USN (Ret.) wrote in a letter to the editor in the current issue of Proceedings (published by the USNI) that while the article was relatively well-balanced, the threat may be overblown. He says that the Soviets developed the SSN-X-13 antiship missile system in the 1970s, but scrapped it by the early-1980s. Among the problems were that to be effective, the missile had to have a nuclear option; so ‘the very launch of an SSN-X-13 could bring on nuclear war’.
He writes that if the DF-21E ever becomes operational, it will suffer the same problems as the SSN-X-13; plus we could probably defend against it where we couldn’t in the '70s against the SSN-X-13.
Straying into GD territory here, but while I accept what you’re saying I also can’t see it making much difference in cases of countries like pre-invasion Iraq where, if the invasion goes ahead, the country is going to be obliterated, most of the top leaders executed anyway. Added to which I doubt of anyone thinks that the US is going to nuke a country like Iran or N Korea because of a nuclear assault on an invading battle group in their own territorial waters.
IOW, what you say is probably true for major players like Russia or China, but military leaders of bit players like Iran or N Korea could almost certainly use such weapons and stand to lose very little.
If your definition of sitting duck is something that could be destroyed by a sea-skimming nuclear missile, then I wonder what you would NOT consider a sitting duck?
But seriously, there were and are more ways to detect and shoot down a missile than you noted in the OP. Back in the Cold War, F-14s had long range Phoenix missiles that could attack cruise missiles. There were also surface fired missiles to intercept faster things at longer ranges than a CIWS. Detection of threats at longer ranges could be done by E-2 Hawkeyes in addition to surface combatants.
Then, of course, you have to acknowledge that it is a big ocean, and battle groups move fairly rapidly. If one pinpoints a battle group, after an hour passes, there’s like a thousand plus square miles of ocean in which the carrier could be.
But certainly if someone wanted to launch a nuclear missile attack on, say, the USS Nimitz, the odds of the battle group surviving would probably be only slightly better than the odds of downtown Washington, DC, surviving a nuclear bombing. However, one might expect that the attacker would pay a dear price indeed for attacking with nuclear weapons.
That was what the original Bikini Atoll nuclear tests were all about. They had more to do with the conflict between the airforce and navy than the US and soviets. The Air Force were trying to prove that carrier groups were sitting ducks against nuclear attack, and hence obsolete (and their budget would be much better spent on the air force).
They did indeed show the vunerablilty of carrier groups to nuclear attack, but the point was made mute a shortly afterwards when the Korean war showed the necessity of having them anyway.
Why not ? It’s not like we haven’t threatened countries like Iran with nuclear attack ( such as Bush saying that we weren’t taking the nuclear approach off the table with Iran ) without them using nukes on our military. I think we’d simply take the excuse and slaughter them with nukes.
Although the question has essentially been answered by various posts, permit me to summarize and clarify:
Aircraft carriers are intended to project air power over a region of broad ocean area, littoral zone, or near-ocean land area. In this sense they are very much the successor to capital artillery gunships (battleships and battlecruisers) whose range, armor, and destructive capability so grossly outclassed smaller ships that they were essentially invulnerable. Similarly, aircraft carriers are able to stay out of the effective range of the zones they are projecting power onto that they require only moderate defense.
The increasing fallacy of the above assumption started at about the time of effective long range jet power, when an opponent using land-based aircraft could deliver a fast and debilitating attack with little warning. The development of semi-autonomous or autonomous anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles with large conventional payloads makes operating an air carrier group anywhere near your opponent extremely problematic. Effectively, the air power projected by aircraft carriers is only effective against an opponent that has essentially no serious naval or marine attack capability.
This was highlighted on in the one major post-WWII naval war between Britain and Argentina over the Falklands Islands. While the British eventually ‘won’ the conflict, the victory was almost literally Pyrrhic, and their embarrassing losses to the third rate Argentine Navy and obsolescent anti-ship missiles even when protected by the most advanced (for the day) shipboard defense systems highlighted some huge flaws in NATO naval strategy for securing the North Atlantic shipping lanes necessary to supply a European land war against Big Red.
As for nukes, if you really want to go there, no military installation or deployment force can effectively be protected from this type of attack. Even the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center would have been turned into Cheyenne Crater National Monument with the application of a few of the Soviet Union’s larger warheads. While considerable effort was put into protecting installations (primarily strategic missile complexes) from nuclear attack, the net result was one $20B installation (Safeguard) that was deactivated only months after deployment due to maintenance cost and feasibility issues, plus the fact that by the time it would be employed the missile silos it was protecting would have already sent their contents halfway around the world to flatten some poor babushka’s hut.
And that highlights the problem with the use of nuclear weapons in any context, even one that is nominally tactical; once someone has initially deployed them against an opponent that has effective nuclear parity, i.e. the ability to respond with equivalent damage, there is really no reason not to respond, and a lot of reasons not to be recalcitrant about using the arsenal. The situation quickly becomes “use it or lose it,” and the deterrent effect of wanting to avoid any exchange flips to being an incentive to use maximum force as quickly as possible to hopefully minimize your own casualties, or at least hurt the other guy at least as badly as he is going to hurt you. Assured Destruction is a tenuous and unstable strategy at best, and using nuclear weapons in any context just invites escalation. The scenario is even worse in a game with multiple players.
Going back to the OP, to hit the carrier group, you need to know where it is. Satellites are not permanently overhead. A nuke explosion 50 miles away (2 hours sailing) isn’t much good. So you need reconaissance: either a sub or a plane. Then you can launch your strike. Naturally, much effort is spent in preventing either of these.
The Falklands campaign isn’t really a good example: the majority of the losses were when the ships were in very restricted waters. This meant that the Argentine aircraft could approach much more easily. Remember that we didn’t have AWACS. Further, the courage and skill of the Argentine pilots should not be doubted.
Adm. Rickover gave a very short lifespan for carriers in a nuclear war during a “60 Minutes” interview but I can’t find it. The closest I’ve found is from here. But this might be a non-nuclear bound.
Yep. Over-the-horizon targeting is what you need even for something as widely devastating a nuclear blast. OTH is a challenge for most countries (especially third-world). And it’s success and effectiveness (from an enemy’s viewpoint) is something we have some control over. This is why Carrier battlegroups are so concerned with every little piece of steel wandering around in the air or water around them for a number of miles. That’s not to say we’re safe or invulnerable, but rather than play the technological leap-frog of missile capability and anti-missile capability, we try and focus on the minimizing the threat of the threat, so to speak.
For those interested in Naval warfare, here’s an interesting look at the latest grumblings and rumblings of our future (or lack thereof), also from Proceedings.
It’s important to specify that this answer was in repsonse to the Soviet threat, which had thousands of nukes and reasonably accurate delivery systems. Not only that, but from what I can tell, it was aimed at getting more funding, so I’m guessing he was injecting a little worst-case bs into that answer.
The closest threat to them nowadays is China, and they don’t really have a true bluewater navy yet. Our carriers would last plenty long, even in a fight against them. Even against the Soviets, I think it could be argued that our carriers would have lasted much longer than two days, even with nukes in the air.