Thanks! I recently was rereading Red Storm Rising, and although it doesn't involve nukes, I always found the carrier strike group battle in the opening days of the war interesting, and it got me wondering about this.
I don't know when it was posted - I think it's a relic of the pre-"September that never ended" internet - but this article on NavWeaps.com about hiding a task force is fascinating:
http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-031.php
"The AS4/6 on a Badger or Backfire in regimental strength backed with Bears in the recon role were and are formidable. They roughly had a Regiment per carrier. In a straight-forward engagement, the issue would have been "in doubt" at best. If a strike regiment caught a CV by surprise it would have been curtains. An alerted CV would have a better than even chance of surviving, but probable losses would have been severe.
But the Regiment running through fighter opposition to their launch points and then getting back out would have taken crippling losses. They would have not been able to mount a second strike and would have been effectively destroyed if not annihilated. If a missile trap is set so that the regiment is climbing to launch altitude over a missile ship it doesn't know about until the radar comes up and missiles start impacting, the fight will be over before it barely starts."
And:
"We would also deliberately provide a false contact reference. If a searching aircraft is intercepted they can draw an operational radius of previously observed intercepts and conclude the CV is in that area. That allows a concentrated search. Now if we had deliberately intercepted him at an extended range and then moved the carrier at high speed in the other direction the search effort is concentrated at the wrong point.
I did that one day by tanking an A7, running him out a long range and bringing him into an intercept of two Bears that were visually searching and identifying fishing boats and merchants trying to find us. I brought him in off-axis and took him back out off-axis (in other words not directly to or from the CV). We then cranked up the 32.5 knots the Midway could then do and went in the other direction. A few hours later we observed a "large number" of search aircraft vainly saturating that area of the ocean and giving all the fishing boats a great air show."