Well, in the original Secret Wars series, the Human Torch uses one of his “nova bursts” (which has been described in various accounts as equivalent to a small nuclear explosion). Cap crouches behind his shield about fifty feet away, survives without injury or even minor inconvenience. He wasn’t even sweating.
And it was indeed completely ridiculous.
Sorry, I have to be pedantic here, but it bothers me that they allowed his spider sense to be some catch-all super ability all on its own. Sure, it makes sense if a heavy boulder’s being thrown at him, or he’s falling into a pit of spikes, but spiders and Peter Parker especially have no concept of what the electronics on a nuke does. He would get no immediate danger reading from pushing any buttons or breaking any wires because none of that can be sensed. Unless he already knew how to disable a nuke, a spider sense would not help him at all in figuring out what to do. Its not like he can just look at something and his brain says “DANGER!”, he has to already know what it does for his mind to subconsciously tell him
/soapbox
Radiation sure, but what about the heat?
IIRC, during the Kaine storyline they made it pretty clear that his spider-sense is just precognition. So, yeah, he gets a DANGER! reaction if a falling object is about to land on him or if someone is about to shoot him in the back – but he could plausibly get that same DANGER! reaction if he’s about to cut the blue wire, or if he’s about to cut the red wire, or – huh, my spidey-sense isn’t going off even though I’m about to cut the green wire? Well, then, I guess cutting the green wire is the smart move.
That’s not actually what happened, though I admit my short description didn’t do it justice. Spider-Man has some idea of how to repair the reactor’s control panel (though he’s painfully aware of how out-of-his-depth he is), because as Peter Parker he’s something of an electronics prodigy. The repair comes down to a fairly convenient “flip this switch one way or the other” decision and his spider-sense goes “crazy” when he starts to move in one direction, prompting him to flip the switch the other way and save the day.
It’s rather weakly contrived, but the story overall was very good, and a huge improvement over the first crossover published in 1976. I’d venture to say it was the best-written DC/Marvel crossover out of the five or six I’ve read.
How this would translate to Spider-Man being confronted with a ticking atom bomb is up to the whim of the writer, I admit.
Captain America’s shield could certainly itself withstand a nuke: It’s canonically the single most indestructible object in the Universe. It might even be able to protect Cap himself, since it has the physics-defying ability to absorb momentum as well as energy, though I don’t know if there are any limits on that ability. But he’s not going to be able to save a whole city like that, because no matter how tough the shield is, it’s not all that big, and anything not in its shadow is still going to get nuked.
Thor has survived nuclear explosions before.
He also just sent both nukes and nuclear power plants that were about to explode into another dimension.
Well, we all know how Cap & Bucky would deal with this situation.
What you say !!
I remember reading a Superman comic back in the 70’s in which a nuclear-powered spaceship, parked at the Metropolis Spaceport, had a reactor that was going critical. He pulled it out of the ship, wrapped it up in his cape, and it went nuclear. The cape bulged out, with little mushroom-cloud-shaped poofs of smoke here and there. All was fine.