As far as I know, the big damage from Nuclear Weapons planetside is the massive blastwave that can pretty much scour the earth, with radiation and thermal damage bringing up the rear.
But in space there is no atmosphere to create a huge concussive and scouring blast wave, which means a nuclear weapon would have to rely on its all-directional thermal and radiation to do damage… but is that enough to actually be usful as a weapon in space, considering ships in space would be designed to handle radiation and extreme thermals due to the lack of any insulative atmosphere?
I know a lot of this might be supposition based on imaginary future tech and assumptions made about materials science and starship creation, but surely at least some rough guess could be made with regards to a thernonuclear detonation without the focusing effects of an atmosphere?
From a NASA paper on this very subject:
Sounds like you’d end up with just a big blast of radiation
I spent 20 minutes searching for an answer to this, and all my searches turned up nothing but video games and short stories.
Appreciate you posting that, and honestly a little frustrated on why that didnt come up for me.
Web search has gotten so bad, I hate it
SEO is a plague on us all.
I’ve completely switched over to using ChatGPT as my basic question search engine now. Like I get that it’s confidently wrong at times and I wouldn’t go there for legal advice but for silly curiosities I’ve got a better chance at finding an answer to satisfy my query.
I beta tested Bard and have used ChatGPT and the number of times they responded with completely wrong answers was stunning. Confidently wrong is a greatvway to put it.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a few years back and it’s been better than Google for a bit. At this rate, I expect Encyclopedia Britannica to make a strong comeback.
What if you can’t afford the whole encyclopedia set and can only buy the sample volume?
And speaking of volcanoes, man are they a violent igneous rock formation!
Jokes aside, the future of paywalled curated knowledge is already here. With the current assault on public libraries, I expect that fairly soon, knowledge will once again be a privileged of wealth.
Perplexity is much better imo
I’ve had good luck with that and using GPT4. Both have their strengths. They’re both great at tldr-ing, If you prompt well.
For the fun fact, shockwave do propagate in the interstellarmedium. Most likely a conventionnal nuke isn’t big enough, but we can see the shockwave from supernova explosion, and voyager did measure the moment it left the sun one.
Radiation may be another beast with a well designed bomb, it’s pretty hard to stop neutrons, and they do a lot of biological damage. However, radiation poisoning isn’t an instant dead. Like shoot a nuke, leave. Come back 2 weeks latter and everyone is dying. Radiation could definitely damage electronic but I would assume spaceship designer worked properly, and the humam will be poisonned before the electronic starts to fail. A note though. The 1/r^2 law would still apply and space is huge. Being 1km out of the explosion divides the dose by 100 compared to being 100m away. 10 km away would divide the dose by 10 000. So the death radius won’t be that big.
Okay, but now we’re comparing nukes and supernovae, and that’s kind of like comparing the erosion of a drop of water to that caused by a tsunami. Sure, the same forces may be at work, but they’re small enough to be negligible in one.
With a heavy dose of radiation you are sick extremely fast, and dead soon after. You may survive for some hours if you have medical care.
If the bomb explode next to the ship, the ship will need solid protection for people to survive.
Follow up question. If I build a giant vacuum chamber on earth and ignited a nuke in the middle of it, what would happen to the blast?
Would the chamber just explode with the full power of the nuke or would it remain unharmed (save for debris of the nuke itself)?
All the radiation that normally heats up the surrounding air into a giant fireball would heat up the walls of your vacuum chamber into a giant fireball.
this is vapor fyi. the nuke and whatever was immediately around it are atomized, literally.
It’s plasma, not gas. It’s a different state of matter.
sure, but it’s not debris.
It’s still matter, with a mass and a velocity, and thus kinetic energy.
And EMP effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
That’s because it detonated in orbit, so it interacted with Earth magnetic field. Far from the planet, I think there wouldn’t be an EMP, unless the targeted ship has it’s own magnetosphere. But I’m not a nuclear physicist, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
If I’m not mistaken the EMP wave is really just a part of the high intensity wave of photons of various frequencies emitted by the explosion, which also includes the so-called “bright flash”.
Some of those photons will have wavelengths that put them in the radio part of the spectrum so they can transverse materials which are not transparent to visible light frequency photons and have the right wavelengths to induce strong electrical currents in electronic circuits and even integrated circuits (which is what burns them) - depending on the length of a conductive line of material there often is a perfect radiowave wavelength to induce a current in it (though I confess that over the years I forgot the formulas to calculate this stuff)
I’m not a Nuclear Physicist but I have 1 year of University level Physics training and an EE degree (though focused on digital systems rather than telecomms).
Thanks for the explanation, I learned something new today.
What about the EMP component of it?
The massive EMPs that blasted the Pacific back in the day were generated with upper-atmospheric testing. The way it interacted with the upper atmosphere was special. If you set off the charge higher in space with no atmosphere, the EMP effect is lessened.
on the ground. without a medium to dissipate the pulse, it still carries a tremendous amount of risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Yeah that’s my biggest note - radiation is a threat to people long term, but EMP destroying their spacecraft’s computers are the larger threat at longer range. ISS and other spacecraft routinely harden many systems for the increased radiation present outside the magnetosphere, but this kind of attack could easily overload those protections. Honestly this aspect terrifies me because it only takes a few EMP blasts in LEO to start a kessler syndrome situation of debris and dead orbital vehicles whizzing around at orbital speeds. That’s how we ‘lose’ space.
Thank you!
That’s one type of radiation it releases.
scratch all this if the missile explodes right in the middle of your bridge
That’s true in a vacuum, but a weapon would presumably detonate on the surface or inside of a hostile ship, in which case the ship goes bye-bye.