Diesel electric boats are extremely quiet when operating off batteries. They’re very tricky to spot, especially the more advanced ones. So a competant captain using the right approach, especially if they weren’t actively looking for it, snuck in. Diesel electric boats are scarier than enemy nuclear boats - but they’re relatively short ranged and can’t operate on electric power indefinitely.
One way of telling would be to see if certain officers were court-martialled or passed over for promotion afterwards. Of course, if the senior officer were to be on his way out anyway, he might just take the fall deliberately… 
Oy, the depth of knowledge on the Dope continues to impress me, even if is is occasionally interspersed by posters who seem to use comic books as their primary reference material.
Stranger, thanks to you and **flyboy ** in particular for fighting my ignorance.
So it seems to boil down to:
-spread out your battle group
-stay far away from enemy shores where ground launched strikes could come from.
-use passive sensors only
-keep your exact location hidden by total EM silence and clever flight profiles for your aircraft.
-make damn sure no subs get too close. (this one seems more problematic to me, as witnessed by the incident with the Chinese boat. I wonder if the noise all those screws from the nearby friendly ships makes it harder for escorting US subs to detect other submarines?)
And yet it seems that in spite of all these clever measures, the groups are still very much at risk from a nuclear strike from a first world navy / airforce with modern delivery systems and warheads.
Fortunately, it seems they still have a much better chance of not being pinpointed / successfully engaged by emerging third world nuclear powers like Iran and North-Korea.
Would you say this is an accurate summary?
Not really.
If you are not close enough to the blast to get killed by the physical effects, your arent really close enough to decidely die from the radiation that results immediately from the bomb going off. The contaminated dirt/whatever/fallout AFTER the blast is a bigger threat IMO.
Of course that depends on a lot of factors and what you consider alot or a little or close or far or high risk or low risk. Somebody else can dig up numbers.
Without wanting to read the whole thread, wouldn’t a Phalanx system be able to defend the battle group against a non-nuclear ballistic missile attack?
Presumably it wouldn’t help against a nuclear attack since the warheads would detonate out of range.
CIWS is almost 30 years old now. Plenty of time to develop missiles that either go too fast for the system, or maneuver as they approach the ship.
Well the defence is if you nuke ANYTHING you are going to pretty much get nuked back. We would have to. Thats the whole point of the system. If we don’t use it their are no point in having nukes. To answer your question I seem to remember nukes not being as deadly on the sea as opposed to land. That being said if you can get close enough to nuke it you probably could. Although any nation who sinks one of our aircraft carriers even by conventional means is pretty screwed. Thats why we have 11 (12?) of them as well as air and naval bases around the world. Power Projection
During the Cold War, our practice General Quarters drills often involved a simulated nuclear attack. “Hit Alpha” was always about 1700 yards away, usually off the port bow, with sufficient time for the Bridge to announce for “All Hands Brace For Shock.” I was never of sufficient pay grade to be privy to more details than that, other than to hear where the Damage Control Parties were dealing with hull breeches. I always presumed that we were practising for best case scenarios…after reading this thread, I’m more sure of it.
Fascinating stuff, Harry1945. 1700 yds is just under one mile, and yet your ship was expected to be able to cope with this. Hmm, one mile would mean that you would have 5 seconds from the flash to broadcast the warning and brace for impact, assuming the shock wave travels at the speed of sound.
May I ask what type / class of ship you served on? Also did you have different drills / scenarios for airburst vs. waterburst detonations?
He meant non-nuclear, but Rickover is hardly an impartial source. He was the strongest proponent of nuclear powered submarines and was a bit biased in favor of submarines rather than carriers.
A carrier’s best hope for defending against a nuclear attack is to avoid being targeted in the first place. Even with a nuclear warhead, the launch platform of a missile has to have enough targeting information to be reasonably sure that when the missile’s terminal guidance activates that it’ll find the carrier. It also has to get close enough to launch. The ocean is a rather big place, and outside of surprise attacks at the start of a war, the battle group is going to do everything it can to kill any ship, plane or submarine looking for it before it can find it. Realistically though, if the situation is going to go nuclear, carriers are going to start sinking. If things go nuclear, though, it’s hard to imagine it stopping at a few tactical weapons at sea or on land for that matter. It’d have to be answered by nuclear strikes from the US, and seeing as the only nuclear powers capable of nuking a US carrier battle group have strategic nuclear arsenals - MAD steps in as the actual real defense of a CVBG against nuclear attack.
The Exocet wasn’t anywhere close to obsolescent in 1982. It was also only responsible for hitting three British ships, the Sheffield, Atlantic Conveyer, and Glamorgon. Two of those three were air-launched, and the last ground launched from a truck on the Falklands. Every other British ship hit (and there were quite a few of them) was hit by free-fall gravity bombs dropped by the Argentinean Air Force. The Argentinean Navy barely left port during the conflict. The painful and sobering lesson for the British Navy was not that it had the most advanced shipboard defenses for the day but rather its complete and total glaring absence. The Royal Navy had become entirely dedicated to its NATO role of anti-submarine warfare to the point of excluding anything else. There wasn’t a single CIWS in the entire navy or even a plan to fit one in 1982. The entirety of the anti-air/anti-missile defense of most ships of the fleet consisted of a pair of manually aimed and operated 20mm guns and one or two mounts of the horridly dated Sea Cat SAM. Had it not been for the failure of most bombs dropped by the Argentineans to detonate the cost would have been much heavier.
Among other things, every British ship was outfitted with Phalanx or Goalkeeper CIWS either at launch or in refit as a result of the Falklands.
I remember a British pilot or sailor being interviewed after the war saying something to the effect that Argentina makes some bloody good race car drivers, why did we think their pilots wouldn’t be any good?