Interesting read. I'd say one thing, bring back diesel boats, the Rickover experiments proved only how noisy and expensive submarines can be. Good men (or women if fully manned male/female - no mixing, it will not work), great batteries and ... Stirling Engines. I'd put to sea today with that, no more nukes. All of that to mean, you can't sink what you can't find.
You don't need to find them if you are using nuclear depth charges. You just need to know they are "in the area". The old "close enough for horseshoes and grenades" adage applies - although even less precision is required.
I got an alternative interpretation by reading it in minutes and torpedo ranges.
All the real specs are classified but the pessimistic public stats indicate a nuclear sub can be out of destruction range within five or so minutes, assuming your detection is perfect to the foot.
Also the destruction distance makes it a nearly perfect ASW weapon against WWII submarines equipped with WWII torpedoes, because the range of an old Mk18 is a mile or so, so if a WWII submarine came thru a time warp and got in close enough to attack a modern carrier, the destroyer screen could pretty much one-shot the sub without serious damage to itself.
The problem comes from modern torps and modern subs. So a nuke running at 20 kts fires a Mk 48 at comfortable-ish 10 miles (eh, maybe half its unofficial range). First of all being 10 miles away you can't just drop the depth charge and expect it to destroy a sub 5 times further away than the official limit. Secondly, at 20 knots for the nuke sub and 20 knots for the ASW destroyer, that 10 miles is 30 minutes to get over the launch position for a destroyer at which time the sub is 10 miles away in a random direction, far out of range. Third even if a destroyer or ASW plane is overhead and drops the charge on a sub, from the testing they detonated at 2500 feet down, and that half mile is going to take awhile. Not that long, but awhile. Meanwhile the sub floors it and at (classified) top speed its going to take well under 2 minutes to get out of the destruction zone.
Its not exactly fish the barrel if you try to wargame it out. The TLDR is drawing a one mile radius circle of destruction isn't necessarily effective if your target takes substantially less than 3 minutes to go one mile.
