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.
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.
save for debris of the nuke itself
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.
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.
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.
Thank you!
That’s one type of radiation it releases.
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.
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.
So, that’s how we get the fantastic four
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.
Its a good way to prevent bikeshedding. Which yes is a real thing.
Yamato cannon operational
Patching you in.
Thats fucking incredible. That deserves to be in more sci-fi.
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.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
well that’s going on my list. ty!
ah, you beat me to it
To everyone else ☝️ Kurzgesagt made a good video about nuking the moon which fits pretty well with ops question. The moon had no atmosphere to speak of and the video explores the effect on terrain
Thank you. I enjoyed it so much, that I purchased their Universe in a Nutshell app!
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
That is largely true, but there are still 2 things : first, the plasma is still a super hot ball of matter with very high kinetic energy. Second, the radiations are still deadly at short range, unless you have specific protections, and radiation protections are heavy and bulky. At worse, the plasma can violently accelerate the target ship and damage it with this sudden acceleration.
But you can also easily turn your atomic bomb into a more refined atomic shell. The you can have projectiles propelled by the explosion (so it’s now an atomic frag bomb), or a penetring shell with a delayed explosion so the explosion occur inside the target ship.
I always thought the initial explosion was so hot it vapourised everything in a certain radius. Would an atomic frag work?
Nasal developed a reactor, orion iirc, that was basically nuclear pulse propulsion: a directed nuclear explosion would propel a jet of plasma on a shield on the back of the ship to propel it, and the ship would use regular explosion for propulsion.
I don’t know the exact dynamic of the nuclear explosion. The temperature turns a lot of things into plasma indeed. But I suspect some construction of the bomb (specific layers with specific materials) could make some kind of frag work.
At the very least you can have an efficient plasma bomb anyway. Your frag is simply plasma in this case. Plasma is still matter that can have high kinetic energy, but it’s very hot too and with specific electromagnetic properties.
In this case, the atomic explosion replaces your powder, and what matters is everything around it.
Nasal developed a reactor
Autocomplete lol
a reactor, orion iirc, that was basically nuclear pulse propulsion:
Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Im getting pretty stuffy this season I could go for a Nasal Reactor tbh.
If you made direct impact wouldn’t the fuselage of the ship and the atmosphere inside it still allow for the traditional blast to propagate?
I think so. I don’t think the bomb directly generates a shockwave, but rather the shockwave is generated by air being superheated which causes a pressure spike. All of the energy that would superheat air would still be present even if the bomb was activated in space, it would just be acting on the first thing it touches ie. the hull of the ship. Does vaporized metal still increase in pressure as temperature increases? I’m guessing it does, which should produce a shockwave. But idk, I’m not a doctor
Chances are there isnt enough air to make a significant difference and any ship large enough to have enough air would have air lock systems as a safety net.
Right, but the ship itself would allow the shockwave, metal is still matter for vibrations to follow.
The shock wave needs a medium (air) to travel through. So if the bomb was touching a ship, it would certainly transfer kinetic energy, but if there was any space (not air) between them, there is still no shockwave for the ship to feel.
A railgun would be far more effective for transfering kinetic energy and it’s munitions would likely be cheaper
How about a railgun with a nuclear payload? Breach the hull and the nuke would work again
With a hull breach the atmosphere within leaks out and I doubt there would be enough oxygen in the ship to really help with detonation. Maybe some self sealing projectile with a nuclear tip but really any traditional explosive would work fine in that case as the ship would act as a sealed canister
I think you overestimate how fast the atmosphere would leak out, or underestimate how fast a nuclear blast goes off. You could detonate the nuke before air really has a chance to start leaving behind the wake of the projectile moving at Mach 12 or whatever. The hole left behind i don’t think would change how the explosion worked inside the ship.
I doubt there would be enough oxygen in the ship to really help with detonation.
How would oxygen help with a nuclear detonation?
A shockwave can travel along the solid structure itself as the medium. Any ship that is actually directly hit would be vaporized. It’s just the whole point of nuke is not needing a direct hit. I doubt any realistic space vessel with anything even remotely similar to plausible near future technology could survive a direct hit from even a moderately sized conventional explosive.
Yeah, it takes incredible amounts of energy just to move unarmored ships slowly around our own solar system.
Seems like adding armor would make them so heavy and slow that they wouldn’t be worth using.
Yeah that’s why any reasonable hard sci-fi has to rely on highly advanced fusion or speculative energy technologies
That would have to be a big ship to feel a shock wave without being consumed by the ball of plasma
Where would that come from? According to a posted article in this thread thermal energy can’t transfer either unless by direct connection and radiation would be the biggest factor, with increasing size compared to on the surface due to lack of atmosphere “attenuating” the distance it travels.
If we’re talking about a direct hit, the radiation is going to be substantial
True, but it’s not a ball of plasma.
The electromagnetic pulse may not cause physical destruction, but it would likely disable any spacecraft in the blast. Which could result in death and destruction when the passengers can’t breathe or get warmth and the craft loses control.
Wouldn’t a spacecraft have a Faraday cage anyway, to protect the electronics from stellar winds?
That might reduce the impact of a given EMP.
If I’ve learned anything from watching nuclear blasts in space on sci-fi shows, it’s that hasshak, dal shakka mel!
Shal’kek nem’ron
Indeed.
This Video will tell you everything you could possibly want to know on the subject, answering your question exactly and in extensive detail. The long and short of it is, not really, no, but they could be made to be very exceptionally effective anyway.
You probably need to wrap the nuke in multiple layers of material. Some inner layer to absord as much energy as possible and transfers it as kinetic energy to an outer high-density layer to create extremly fast shrapnel.
So a nuclear pipebomb
