“those missiles could deliver a barrage of nuclear warheads (they use the big multi-megaton types), coming in at mach 9.”
if they feel like starting a nuclear war.... then yeah. But then the loss of a carrier is small potatoes. That’s when a trident or two alone sends China back to the stone age. (roughly 70 years ago for them)
Doesn’t need to be nuclear, but a Mach 9 MIRV a few hundred 150 lb, 2” diameter by 6 foot long tungsten tipped rods coming down at 6000 MPH will shred just about anything. And there’s not much you can do with a destroyer screen to take out such tiny targets (about the size of two baseball bats, stacked end to end, moving at 1.6 miles per second.
That’s the big danger with ICBMs - you can use them for quick deployment of “rod of god” kinetic bombardment weapons. ICBM goes up, warhead orients, and out come the rods. Each with the equivalent energy of 600 cars moving at 60 MPH. Concentrated on a little 2” area. Nothing that floats will stand up to that.