What would happen if a nuclear missle exploded just a few miles out of the atmosphere in space?

Question

Would EMP still affect us directly.....if an expolosion was above the atmosphere?

Answer 1

It depends on the size of the warhead, but it would be very damaging.

First it would destroy the satellites in the immediate area, then it would spread an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP). An EMP could destroy half the satellites in orbit (right up to the horizon from the blast). The countries that lie below that nuclear explosion would also have to suffer an EMP.

Again this depends on the size of the nuclear explosive, the larger it is the larger the effect would be. However, even a small one would wipe out a lot of satellites because they have no shielding strong enough to resist this and there is no barrier to the transmission of the EMP waves in the near vacuum at that height.

What does an EMP do, well that goes back to the days when tubes were still used in TVs instead of transistors. The tubes burned out frequently and had to be replaced. They were a pretty poor technology and operated at 60% efficiency. A modern transistor could fit on the tip of the end of just one of the plugs on the bottom of the tube. This makes a great advancement, it basically turns a computer that would fill a barn into one the size of your home PC, and your PC can do more than that old computer ever could. The transistor runs at 90% efficiency as, do LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes). If an EMP hits a transistor or an LED then it is hit with 120% of the power that normally runs though it or more, which burns it out. Most electrical equipment would be dead; dead as in their circuits fried. You would have to replace ever circuit board, every electronic sensor, even some of the circuit lines would be burned, ruining that board. Boards that are dead like this cannot be fixed. 20 years ago they could have been fixed, but transistors can now fit on the head of a pin. They are sealed in blocks or so small that you couldn’t get to them to change them without destroying the circuit board.

Let’s look at the average home and see what would happen there. Well your toaster would be fine, but your microwave would be toast. Any system that uses a touch screen control pad would be dead. This could be your oven, your dishwasher and your stove. The temperature sensor in your freezer and refrigerator could go out. They used to use a thermocouple to monitor the temperature, but modern ones use a transistor as the sensor. Now you can’t cook or store any cold food. Modern blenders, bread makers and other appliances would be dead. Even some of the older equipment uses transistors. In your living room your TV, VCR, DVD Player, TiVo, stereo, your tape player, your CD player and your computer would all be dead. Your speakers will work, but you won’t be able to receive a signal with just speakers (at least not one you can hear). Any lights that operate by touch could use a transistor sensor so most of them will be dead. Your clock will be dead. Your DVDs and your CDs wouldn’t be affected, but VCR tapes will have some partial loss and static. The data on your computer disks, and your hard drive would be scrambled. Your ROM and RAM memory would be scrambled as well. All of your remotes would be useless junk.

If you went into the bedroom then your alarm clock would be dead. The thermostat that controls the temperature in your house would be dead. Many fluorescent lights would be dead, but the standard incandescent bulbs will work. Of course you won’t have any power running into your building because the transformers would probably explode with all the extra power. If they didn’t then the delicate control equipment that runs the power plants would fail.

Now we look into the bathroom, everything here should work fine, except for your electric razor. Of course you won’t have any electricity, and since the controls that monitor water pumps would be dead your water flow would be limited and likely to run out soon. The electric thermometer you have in your medicine chest is dead, as is your electric toothbrush. But, your candles and your butane lighter would work.
Your doorbell would be dead as would any electric sensing equipment. Your fan would work, if it had any juice, unless it is a modern one that uses a touch screen. The same would be true with your heater. Your cell phone and pager are dead, as are most watches. Digital Watches would be fried, but the EMP would also kill something with a quartz movement. The only watches that would survive would be the old fashioned wind up ones.

When you go into the garage your old power tools would work, but anything with a programmable function would be dead. The electric batteries would also have trouble. The high power ones could ignite or explode. Even alkaline batteries would have a chance of receiving too much power and so leaking battery acid or exploding. So there goes your portable power tools and your flashlight. The garage door opener won’t open, its button won’t work, and neither will the clicker. You car will be so dead that you can’t even start it; unless it is a 30 year old classic it would be easier to junk the car rather than repair it. There are at least 40 separate computers in the average modern car; the high-end cars will have more and even worse off.

The country would be returned to a Dark Age, literally. The equipment that makes the machines that make electronic circuits would be all dead. We would have to go back to the basics. Since we don’t have tubes any more only the simplest of electric devices would work (mainly you could get an electric motor to run). We wouldn’t be able to fall back to 1950 technology, because we have so little of it left. The same can be said for any advanced technology. Steam powered machines and the like are pretty rare, normally only in museums. Those that aren’t are monitored and controlled by modern electronics so they would have to repaired, but we wouldn’t have the equipment to do it.

Poor civilizations would be able to fall back on their average technology, because most of it would be primitive enough to survive. But, all the rich and developing nations would be destroyed. These civilizations wouldn’t have the equipment to survive and would have to fall back to the age of hand tools. These nations don’t even have the ability to make iron. Sure the equipment is there, but its controls are dead. These nations could recover over time, but since most of the money in the world is electronic they would be broke. Wall Street would face the worst crash in history and stockbrokers would be falling off buildings like a tree that is hit by an early winter.

Think about the perils and worries we had for the turn of the century. It didn’t turn out to be a problem because millions of people and billions of dollars were working behind the scenes to make sure nothing happened. Also we didn’t have a worse case scenario. An EMP attack would compare to the Millennium Bug like a Nissan Pick up compares to an Astro Dump Truck, those are the multimillion-dollar trucks that have tires larger than a man and can haul a small house.

So why hasn’t anything like this happened yet. Remember we used the first atomic bomb in the 1940s, when tubes were still used and the transistor was a dream. Later tests in the 1950s and the 1960s were done in remote areas and didn’t have a large range. Most modern nations test their nuclear weapons in remote areas with an underground explosion.

Why is this kind of EMP so dangerous? Well think about a radio or TV transmission tower. These things stick up thousands of feet in the air and can broadcast for miles. You are putting an even stronger transmitter up at an altitude of 3 miles.

Compared to the EMP the direct effects of a nuclear weapon detonated that high would be a flash in the pan. The most destructive physical effect of an atomic bomb is the blast wave that is set up in the air or water. The heat is also tremendous. In space there would be no blast wave, and without a blast wave to carry the heat, it would be confined to a small area. Space at 3 miles high is a near vacuum so there would be little matter to turn radioactive and produce fallout. You would get some fallout, but it would filter down to the earth and hit the high air streams. The fallout would then be spread over such a large area that it would be barely noticeable.

Now imagine an EMP attack. The bomb blast would last seconds as would the EMP field, but after that any electronics brought into the area would be fine. There wouldn’t be any radiation, and no craters. The enemy could roll into the area and the nation attacked would be helpless. That nation couldn’t even tell itself that it was under attack. The fastest a message could be carried would be on horseback or with human runners. The attacked nation couldn’t rally its troops and get them into the area to defend themselves. Their rifles, pistols and even some cannons will still work fine, but a single crossbow fired at the right time is worth more than 10 tons of artillery stuck in the mud an hour down the road.

The US military is well aware of this problem, in fact they are researching the capability to make a bomb that just fires an EMP. Military equipment is hardened against an EMP, so unless it was very close to the explosion it would still work. But, only the military is willing to shell out the extra money to get hardened equipment. All state agencies and below will be helpless, as will most of the federal agencies. The White House will still have communications, but the only people they can talk with are the military.

Then there is the supply problem. Military trucks are hardened, but the trucks that get the equipment and food to the military will be dead. The refrigerators on the military base will be dead. The military has enough supplies to run for 30-90 days, but after that they will be pretty helpless. Filing the gas tanks on their vehicles will be difficult since most gas pumps use an electronic system to control the pump. They will have to take apart the pumps and jump-start them.

The final problem is with the civilian population. Manhattan Island will become a death trap; the people can live off the food in the city for only a few days. Most large cities only have enough stocks on hand to operate for a few days. Imagine the total blackout of New York and throw in the riots of a winning sports team, mix in the desperation of the situation and the risk of starvation. The resulting formula is public disaster. So the people in the rural areas would be in the best shape, until those that survived to the cites got to them. The only ones that would get out of the city death traps would be strong people who would be more than willing to kill to get what they want. They would be armed and ready for battle, and more than willing to, lie, cheat, steal or kill to get what they want. The people who wouldn’t be in that condition would be all dead.

This is just one powerful bomb on top of a missile detonated high up in space. Countries like Iran and China would survive better than would the US. Sure they would both be hurt, but they could recover quicker and the fall wouldn’t be as steep as it would be in Europe, Canada or the US.

Let’s go back 20 years or so when Ronald Regan was first told about all these dangers, and then he was told about a plan to defend the US against this kind of attack. Is there any wonder that he favored the “Star Wars” missile defense shield? He didn’t want to put nuclear weapons in space he only wanted to establish a defense against them.

So what are our current defenses? We know about 4 antimissile sites on the West Coast, so we can expect others hidden around the US. But, hitting a missile with a missile is like you trying to stop an incoming rock by throwing another rock at it. We have advanced computers to help us, but the scale is so huge that my analogy still holds. Realistically we can shoot down one missile with a 75% accuracy, but what about a dozen, or 100. All the bad guys need to do is to get one missile over the US that makes an air detonation. But, have no fear the US Air Force has a 747 equipped with a set of lasers that can shoot down incoming missiles. Of course the lasers are huge and require big tanks of toxic chemicals to operate, there is no other way to generate the power required. These planes and the equipment are expensive, but the US could build a fleet of them to protect America. That is until Congress canceled the program. Then we could fall back on our Patriot Missiles, but they don’t have that kind of range, and their accuracy was over stated during Desert Storm. Against this kind of attack we are not very well prepared.

Now imagine what happens if Hezbollah takes three of Iran’s new nuclear weapons and ships them in airborne shipping containers to the US. A lot of the cargo coming into the US is not inspected until it reaches the US airport. They put an altimeter fuse in them to blow up when the plane drops below 3,000 feet. They then ship one bomb to LAX, one to New York, and one to Dallas or Houston. That attack cripples our finical system and closes one of our largest ports. Houston’s port is second, in shipping, only to New York. Dallas has a large population as does Houston, New York and Los Angeles; they also all have Intercontinental Airports. The bombs wouldn’t be very large and wouldn’t kill a lot of people, but the EMP would cripple those areas, and that would be a better attack. The US would have to spend millions of dollars to support those cities, and it would take billions to repair them.

If a nuclear weapon were exploded at an altitude of 3 miles then it would wipe out three or four satellites and have very little direct effect. But, the EMP would be devastating.

Answer 2

That also would depend on how far above the earth. If outside the Van Allen belts of within the area of the earth shielded by the solar winds, nothing would really happen. There would be a tremendous flash of light with the release of neutrons and other radiation, particularly gamma rays. But most of these would be intercepted by the ionisphere, the charged layer of our atmosphere which is more important to us than we think about.
Of course, there is no sound in outer space as there is no matter to compress and transmit the pressure we sense as sound.
The EMP is a factor in any nuclear blast, however, there were multiple ground and tower based nuclear warheads detonated and Nevada and California never lost communications. The effects of very large sun surface activity has a greater effect than test blasts.

Answer 3

A nuclear missile will produce a large EMP when detonated. In space, the EMP is even larger since it is not hindered by the atmosphere. In fact, during the coldwar the US denotated a nuclear warhead approaching LEO over the Pacific Ocean. Due to the high altitude, the weapon created an EMP that disrupted electronic systems as far away as hawaii (over 800 miles away from the flashpoint!). So yes, nuclear warheads produce LARGE EMPs. During the coldwar, the U.S. built many army bunkers underground with radiation-shielding to protect key systems from nuclear EMPs. hope this clears things up for you :)

Answer 4

This has already been done - many, many times. Mostly by the US, but also by other countries including France, Great Britain, Germany, and the USSR. If I recall correctly, the US alone performed some 300 atmospheric test with atomic and hydrogen bombs. This testing was done mostly during the 60's and 70's - before the treaties precluded it.

Answer 5

It blows out in space causing thinning of the ozone layers thus solar ultraviolet radiation entry to lower atmosphere is less blocked.

Answer 6

Hi. There would be an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) that would damage all wires (computers, navigation equipment, etc.) within its blast range. This would be the beginning of a pretty bad day.

Answer 7

Big Electromagnetic Pulse....This will fry all satellite and earthbound electronics within a wide area.

Some bombs are rendered safe by firing a portable EMP at them.

Answer 8

It is very unlikely that there would be any significant effect noticed. Most radiation would stop at the ionosphere.

Answer 9

Well it's gona blow up some satellites, but major consern will be radioactive cloud/rain.

Answer 10

Satellite television customers would be pissed. Cellphone users would be pissed. Power grids might be shut down and their customers would be pissed, but only for a short while.

Answer 11

Nothing would happen, unless there was a satelite nearby, then the people that owned that satelite would be pissed off.