Basic scenario is The Flash* saves an entire city from a detonating nuclear warhead. Pretty good going, but how would other superheroes fair in the same situation. Assume they arrive on the scene (as individuals, not as a team) and open the device up to find there is only three seconds to detonation. The device is contained in a medium sized van and not secured to the ground.
Superman could probably carry it into the sky, he would be fine (I think) but would he be quick enough to get it far enough away before it detonated?
Wolverine would just try slashing at it with his claws, he might be lucky enough to cut through something and prevent the detonation, otherwise I don’t think even he could survive a nuclear fireball from the inside.
Spiderman? Well I’m fairly sure he’s screwed.
Others?
*I also recall a scene from the Justice League cartoon where he carries a conventional bomb outside a city just as it is about to explode.
Well, Spider-Man was in a somewhat similar predicament in the second DC/Marvel crossover back in 1981. Doctor Doom had built a reactor that was running out of control and while Superman held the core together (!), Spider-Man tried to fix a smashed control panel and shut the reactor down before it destroyed Earth. His spider-sense guided him through the process.
At the very least, he’d be alert to the huge danger and if he moved quickly enough on pure reflex, I can see him disassembling/breaking the bomb enough to shut it off. Of course, if it’s one of those comic-book bombs with a series of unlikely and elaborate failsafes…
Nuclear weapons are precision devices; most supers with useful offensive powers could stop it from detonating properly. Lots of them would get really sick or die in the process though, if the chemical explosives go off or from the scattered radioactive components.
Cyclops for example could just blast it away from him; he’d be fine, but the people downwind wouldn’t be when the atomized bits of bomb fell on them.
Wolverine slashing it with his claws wouldn’t necessarily stop the chemical explosives component from going off and spreading radioactives all over, but it would almost certainly stop the actual nuclear detonation from occurring unless he somehow managed to avoid hitting anything important. Although anti-tampering device might detect his strike and detonating the bomb prematurely, before he can damage it; by preference you should hit the bomb with something faster than a human arm.
Spiderman with his spider sense would have a good chance of being able to disarm it harmlessly; he just needs to strike at whatever doesn’t set off his spider sense. (EDIT: And I see I was beaten to that)
Anyone with strong enough cold powers ought to be able to stop it from detonating. Iceman, Superman’s cold breath, etc. One way the real-life military disposes of old bombs is to freeze them with liquid nitrogen and shatter them to dust.
And isn’t one of Spider-Man’s less-discussed powers an immunity to radiation (I mean, he does after all have radioactive blood)? So he would probably even survive the dirty-bomb fizzle, too. And Wolverine certainly would.
Most nukes use a conventional explosive to trigger the nuke, don’t they? Couldn’t Wolverine slash through the bomb casing and through the detonators for the conventional explosive, disarming it? He’d be exposed to radiation, but he’d heal.
IIRC, there was a storyline where some alien launched a massive projectile at earth that would have destroyed it, and Kitty saved the world by phasing herself and the projectile through the earth, but was then left in some sort of quasi-phased state, where she couldn’t become solid again, or else either the projectile would destroy some other world, or she would get bucked off of it, and stranded in deep space, or something like that. Presumably, that’d happen if she tried to phase a nuclear explosion: she could phase the bomb, and the explosion, but she couldn’t phase back, or else the detonation would kill everybody.
Sun Boy could maybe absorb the radiation, but I don’t know what he could do with the explosion?
Yeah, I remember that story. It was from Joss Whedon’s run. The projectile was made out of some special metal that should have been immune to Kitty’s phasing powers, but due to earlier events, she was able to “dig deep” and overcome the materials resistance - at the cost of not being able to de-phase from it, so she was trapped inside this thing, hurtling through space forever.
Or about six months, which I think was how long it took for someone to bring her back.
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Green Lantern could probably wrap it up in one of his constructs and contain the blast. Not sure if his power levels are that high.
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But his power levels are high enough to just do the strength trick, right?
