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if God forbid a couple of IIAF F-4’s were to powerdive into
Big E’s flightdeck with AP bombs aboard and survive long enough to strike it, E could sink.

They know that USN are alert to civil air fraffic and
may have fixed some of their phantoms to squak civil aircraft idents to blend in with the Gulf air traffic.

I was just thinking - if the Iranians attack with “speed boats” the Big E could just turn on the horse power and swamp them all with it’s wake - while they were still in harbor!

There are some great stories of the Big E doing speed trials off of San Diego and swamping boats in harbor....

if God forbid a couple of IIAF F-4’s were to powerdive into Big E’s flightdeck with AP bombs aboard and survive long enough to strike it, E could sink.

Hardly. In 1969 Enterprise herself experienced a similar flight-deck conflagration to what Forrestal had survived a couple years earlier. The fire really messed up the aft end of the ship, largely due to multiple 2000lb bombs cooking off.

It's believed that Enterprise absorbed the equivalent of 9 or 10 large ASM/Cruise Missile hits. Which would be the rough equivalent of eating a like number of F-4s loaded with HE. She survived, and if it weren't for the need to conduct the investigation and the ability to replace her on the line with another CV (to allow her to be fixed properly) could have been back in service (with some limitations) in a matter of days.

As I said, Forrestal went through something similar (worse, actually) in 1967. And then there's the damage the very-lightly armored Franklin and Bunker Hill took near the end of WWII, plus the damage this Enterprise's (CVN-65) namesake (CV-6) survived (and remained largely operational) during both Okinawa AND the Guadalcanal campaign.

Of the fleet carrier losses in early WWII, only Wasp's was really unpreventable from a post-design perspective. She had negligible torpedo protection as-built and ate a torpedo in a very bad place. Lexington would have lived if her CO hadn't ventilated the ship, Yorktown would have lived (and Hornet might have lived) except for the "early" decisions to abandon them.