What if the military really had detonated nukes for Nightfall? - 10/09/11 09:16 PM
Just wondering what bad things might have happened if the military had used nukes in an attempt to deal with Nightfall. In my admittedly small knowledge, here are some things that might have happened:
1) Fallout - would this spread all over the Northern Hemisphere as they said on the show? Wouldn't that depend on the altitude at which the bomb was detonated?
2) Electromagnetic pulse - wouldn't the bomb explosion take out communications satellites? And, since Nan just wrote a fic about Luthor's evil plans involving multiple EMP's (I've forgotten the name of the fic, darn it, but she posted it not too long ago), wouldn't the EMP damage just about everything electronic on the Earth's surface, too?
3) Atmospheric effects - don't radio waves bounce off the atmosphere? Would a nuke going off in the upper atmosphere cause turbulence and mess up the bounce-off layer? (And yes, I am totally ignorant of the fine points of radio reception and transmission, so if anyone can correct my misconceptions, please do so.)
4) If people were looking at the blast when it happened, wouldn't they go blind? It happened at Hiroshima.
I guess that a lot of effects might be attenuated by distance, but isn't there a problem with control of the missile when it gets out of Earth orbit and far away?
What else might happen?
1) Fallout - would this spread all over the Northern Hemisphere as they said on the show? Wouldn't that depend on the altitude at which the bomb was detonated?
2) Electromagnetic pulse - wouldn't the bomb explosion take out communications satellites? And, since Nan just wrote a fic about Luthor's evil plans involving multiple EMP's (I've forgotten the name of the fic, darn it, but she posted it not too long ago), wouldn't the EMP damage just about everything electronic on the Earth's surface, too?
3) Atmospheric effects - don't radio waves bounce off the atmosphere? Would a nuke going off in the upper atmosphere cause turbulence and mess up the bounce-off layer? (And yes, I am totally ignorant of the fine points of radio reception and transmission, so if anyone can correct my misconceptions, please do so.)
4) If people were looking at the blast when it happened, wouldn't they go blind? It happened at Hiroshima.
I guess that a lot of effects might be attenuated by distance, but isn't there a problem with control of the missile when it gets out of Earth orbit and far away?
What else might happen?