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:
If a nuclear weapon is exploded in a vacuum-i. e., in space-the complexion of weapon effects changes drastically:
First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely.
Second, thermal radiation, as usually defined, also disappears. There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself.
Third, in the absence of the atmosphere, nuclear radiation will suffer no physical attenuation and the only degradation in intensity will arise from reduction with distance. As a result the range of significant dosages will be many times greater than is the case at sea level.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
save for debris of the nuke itself
this is vapor fyi. the nuke and whatever was immediately around it are atomized, literally.
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).
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.
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.
the EMP effect is lessened.
Others have answered you question about non-directed nuclear blasts in space already. They don’t work the same way as in atmosphere; lack the blast or the thermal heat, etc. Enter the Casaba-Howitzer, a theoretical nuclear shaped charge that shoots a directed plasma stream at near light speed. This idea came about in the 60s along with nuclear blast propulsion.
The name comes from the casaba melon, a variety of honeydew, because the lab was “on a melon kick that year,” naming various projects after melons and having already used up all the good ones.
I can appreciate that sort of naming convention.
I completely agree. It was used in To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini. I can’t think of many other works that use it.
Question is already answered, but. The BSG miniseries has a good nuke scene which is actually pretty reasonable: https://youtu.be/R-L4tVksGYc
Atomic Rockets has a whole page for this
https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php
