On May 5, 1:53 pm, "Arved Sandstrom" wrote:

In reality, with either a CSG or ESG, you'll have ships very far apart. Any
one nuclear weapon may be bad news for one or two ships, a few more won't
like it, and the rest will be relatively unscathed. Unless, as you say, the
enemy uses some rather stupendous weapons.

The real problem is not that one or two nuclear weapons (let's say they are
medium-size fission weapons) is going to wreck the entire fleet, but that
your high-value assets may be mission-killed. A 50 kT airburst 3-4 km from
your CVN is not going to be conducive to continued flights ops in the near
or medium future.

During Cold War preparations, it was assumed that nukes would be used
against CVBGs in the North Sea. The blast radius of a nuke with the
accuracy necessary to hit a ship was deemed small enough that only the
target ship would be mission killed.

The other ships in the group would be far enough away from each other
to be somewhat unscathed by the blast, and free to maneuver to avoid
the fallout and/or conduct washdown procedures.

The washdown system on the Nimitz class is even designed to wash
fallout off aircraft that are parked on the deck.