Canadian_Mind Canadian_Mind:
A better question is what kind of wrhead is going to be leathal to a 70 000 tonne ship. It takes a conventional missle about 10 minutes to half an hour to sink a 5 000 tonne ship after a single, direct hit.
I think a conventional warhead would have to be in the order of 10,000 pounds of explosives (i.e. not including the weight of the armour penetration covering) to have a hope in hell of sinking a carrier. It would probably result in an operational kill but I'm not sure if that's the goal or not. A tactical nuclear warhead would be much more effective for the weapon's purpose (if China is going to attack the U.S. carriers it might as well break out the tactical nukes because we're all screwed anyway). A conventional missile would have to be the size of an ICBM in order to travel 1,200 miles at Mach 10 (!) with that sized conventional warhead plus guidance systems, fuel, etc. The Chinese are claiming the missile has high manoeverability and a low RCS, so my money would be on tactical nuclear warhead.