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?

  • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    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 has no atmosphere to speak of and the video explores the effect on terrain