Carriers are a strategic system, not because they carry nukes, but because they threaten nuclear arms of the military. Most of China's nuclear arsenal is well out of reach of the U.S. Navy anyway. The main operating bases and silo fields for the former 2nd Artillery Corps are in Xinjiang.
The distances are comparable when you look at Dombarovskiy from the North or Mediterranean Seas and Base 64 from the Pacific.
No. It moves about as fast as an ADCAP judging from the shape. Somewhere between 50-70 knots.
The only misdirection is vague allusions to Stalinist-era weapons by popular science journalists. Someone saw Poseidon was a big torpedo, and remembered the Soviet Navy in 1955 got told by an obscure weapons scientist that they could have a 100 megaton torpedo with the Tsar Bomba's fusion warhead, so obviously Poseidon has this giant obscure bomb and is basically this old thing no one cares about anymore.
The reality is that the warhead is probably similar in yield to the Kh-22's nuclear warhead and intended to sink carriers and their escorts. Poseidon probably doesn't have the sensor fit necessary for autonomous tailing of SSBNs.
I think it might just be a 50-60 nmi firing range ASTOR. The nuclear propulsion is to make sure it closes that range fast enough that the carrier can't just sprint away for another 15-20 nmi in the opposite bearing and the 2 megaton warhead ensures that the CVBG is damaged or degraded in formation. Multiple torpedoes could be fired on multiple TMA solutions to achieve a greater chance of kill.
This would be done in conjunction with a more conventional multi-axis missile attack by Zircons and Kh-32s I guess.
There's also been talk of Poseidon using the underwater acoustic network in the Arctic, which might play into tracking submarines, but that would be offboard sensors and underwater acoustic data transmission is kind of hard even for the best submarine forces. It seems more likely this will be done by the launch submarines and it will employ the Poseidon essentially as a very large, otherwise conventional, long-range torpedo. Perhaps it will employ a fiber optic link back to the Oscar for updates. It simply doesn't appear to have any serious sonars beyond a collision avoidance HFA in the nose. No hull or trailing arrays. No horseshoe or spherical arrays in the nose.
It's not built for passive detection and tracking. It's built to go fast for a long time.
I think that's more in line with what Russia is actually capable of, too. I can believe a large submarine can be modernized to the extent it can fire extremely long range weapons accurately, with a physical weapon datalink, using underwater packet exchange with acoustic SOSUS sensors.
I find it harder to believe the Russians have made a super smart torpedo that can replace the submarine's own CIC.
tl;dr Northern Fleet will probably use it as a weapon to kill SSBNs in lieu of sending out an Akula. Pacific Fleet will use it to kill CVBGs in lieu of sending out a Tu-22 regiment. Both will use them as mostly normal torpedoes fired from a modified Oscar II.
It's a recognition more that the SSN fleet is too small to tail NATO boomers and the cruise missiles in inventory are too few in number to penetrate Aegis, and a concession that Russian underwater weapon complexes are aging. Big warhead + nuclear propulsion = fast torpedo with a large targeting ambiguity and long range. A conventional torpedo would require a near direct hit, and multiple warheads, while a non-nuclear powered torpedo would be either too slow or too large to be practical at long range.
Poseidon just isn't built for shallow water work required for a strategic weapon or long-range carrier tail.
The DPRK minisub thing might be more like that.
