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?

  • DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world
    189·
    8 months ago

    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

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      901·
      8 months ago

      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.

        • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
          208·
          8 months ago

          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.

          • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
            34·
            8 months ago

            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.

            • AmidFuror@kbin.social
              6·
              8 months ago

              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!

              • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
                4·
                8 months ago

                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.

    • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      8 months ago

      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)?

      • Jojo@lemm.ee
        111·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        save for debris of the nuke itself

        this is vapor fyi. the nuke and whatever was immediately around it are atomized, literally.

    • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
        3·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • General_Shenanigans@lemmy.world
        4·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • rambaroo@lemmy.world
      1·
      8 months ago

      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.