- Completely safe, while you’re up in the air at least.
- It depends on various factors.
- Immediately toast.
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voters
As I was travelling back from Indonesia to Europe last week, my plane flew over India and Pakistan, and I started to wonder what would happen if these countries went full-on MAD as I was there up in the air. I’m talking lobbing every nuclear weapons they have at their disposal at each other to inflict maximum damage.
Obviously, the consequences would be devastating on the ground, but what about selfish me ? Would I be just as toast as the unfortunate millions of people below ? Safe, although likely traumatized for life by the mind-bogglingly tragic fireworks ? Neither completely safe nor instantly doomed, depending on various factors ?
For the purpose of this discussion, discard all logistical considerations such as “where would you land if the airport you were heading to was obliterated?”
I’m just curious as to how safe you’d be at 33,000 feet in this scenario.
As I understand it, to some degree it depends on the plane since different plane designs have widely different levels of vulnerability to EMP. And, nobody is really sure how well any of the hardening or backup systems would actually work, due to the lack of real-life incidents to judge them by.
This article mentions some of the issues (page 122).
Most mushroom clouds will reach into the stratosphere and will be several miles wide depending on yield, so height alone isn’t going to save you. You’re going to need to be a long way away.
And apart from any EMP effects, the turbulence is going to be insane.
Airspace is a big, big place and tremendous volume. I’d wager that the direct blast effects, such as air movement, itself, wouldn’t affect your airplane much or even at all, depending, of course, on whether you’re near a city or flying over flyover farmland. You’d probably catch a glimpse of some fireballs in the distance, especially if at night.
- Without knowing the distance from a blast, it’s hard to say.
- It’s not well-known how vulnerable commercial airplanes are to EMP.
- Depending on the distance, blast waves could be a significant concern.
- Mushroom clouds develop slowly enough that a competent pilot could avoid them.
Enola Gay was about 15 miles away and 6 miles up from ground zero at detonation, and it still got buffetted by the blast. That was just a 10-15kt bomb. Modern strategic bombs will be 10-20x bigger if you’re talking about India, and even more if you’re talking about other countries.
So, setting aside the EMP since there’s too much uncertainty to talk about. Apart from that, my biggest worry would be that given a “massive nuclear exchange”, nukes would be deployed in large enough numbers that there’s a good chance one of them would detonate fairly close to the aircraft I’m flying in, maybe close enough for the shockwave to destabilize or even damage it.
[Mutually] Assured Destruction (the first word was added to the term by critics of the thesis starting with Herman Kahn to ridicule the notion) is a deterrence strategy, not a battle plan; if weapons start flying the strategy has failed. India and Pakistan both have around 170 nuclear weapons with a mix of delivery systems; some number of each arsenals are likely ‘tactical’-sized weapons but there are certainly enough to devastate the populations of each nation if delivered strategically,
The degree of safety depends on the distance from the blast zone; the thermal pulse and initial blast wave radiate outward in all directions, while the ‘fireball’ from a near ground level detonation rises up, creating a vacuum near the ground and creating the enormous updraft observed from a distance as a ‘mushroom cloud’. This creates an intense, sustained wind at the surface and turbulence in the atmosphere. The survivability of an aircraft will depend on the intensity of the weapon, durability of the plane, and how much the blast and fireball effects are attenuated at that distance.
Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a nuclear blast is a high altitude effect from interactions between the X-rays and gamma rays emitted by a nuclear weapon detonated above the thickest part of the Earth’s atmosphere (>30 km AMSL) and charged particles trapped in the magnetosphere. A near-ground level or low altitude airburst intended to do damage to structures and populations will not generate a significant EMP event because this radiation will be absorbed and converted to thermal and blast effects. A high altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) will send out an intense radio-frequency pulse three distinct frequency elements (identified as E1, E2, and E3) that will affect an area on the surface and airspace hundreds to thousands of kilometers in extent depending in altitude and energetic yield of the weapon. The E1 component in particular will induce currents in unshielded electronic devices (those with an antenna or connected to a radio-frequency sensitive conductor) which can result in breakdown of delicate elements like semiconductor electronics, while the E3 component will damage and disrupt electrical grids similar to (although lasting for a shorter duration than) an intense geomagnetic storm.
More information for those interested in educating themselves about nuclear weapon effects and consequences:
https://test.ucsaction.org/nuclear-weapons/worldwide
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02506-w
Stranger
One issue not yet mentioned. Flash blindness.
If your face is pointed in the general direction of an air burst within line of sight, so maybe 200 miles on a clear day, the initial detonation flash will blind you instantly. Maybe only for a couple / few minutes, or maybe permanently. If you happen to be facing one that goes off closer in, say 20 miles, it’ll be permanent.
The pilots have a much larger set of windows than you do.
When the B-52 goes into nuclear combat they pull heavy curtains across all the windows to prevent that problem. They are flying and navigating and avoiding terrain entirely using their sensors.
When I was training for this mission in fighters we were issued an eye patch like a person lacking an eye might wear. But much heavier more opaque material and very snug fitting. You put on the patch before your helmet and wear it throughout the mission. So you’re flying the whole mission with one eye. If you get flash blinded by either friendly or enemy nuke flash, well, you just spent one of your two eyes. Take off the patch and continue the mission with your remaining used-to-be-spare eye. If that one gets expended by another flash, well it’s game over. Jump out or ride it in as you prefer.
Nuclear combat is not a healthy environment no matter where you are.
Sorry, I was indeed playing somewhat fast and loose with the official definition. I used it literally, i.e. each country is actively trying to obliterate the other.
Modern fly-by-wire control systems might not like all those electromagnetic pulses.
I don’t know anything about how susceptible something modern like an Airbus might be to catastrophic computer failure, except I believe they do have some type of mechanical fallback for control systems.
I always wondered about the wisdom of military aircraft with pure computer-mediated aerodynamic controls in an environment that reasonably could include tactical nuclear detonations. A modern relaxed-stability warplane might simply depart envelope and come apart at Mach if the control computers get zapped. I assume the manufacturers harden and test for that.
I wasn’t trying to chastise, just educate. The term is widely abused after it came into general parlance, and even within the nuclear deterrence community it is often misused by people who don’t understand the specific precepts of Assured Destruction as contrasted with more general theories of strategic deterrence.
Aircraft specifically designed to operate in a nuclear warfare environment are ‘hardened’ (electronics shielded or built to be robust) against EMP. But to be frank, an HEMP attack is a precursor to a full strategic exchange, and any technologically advanced warfighting capabilities are going to be moot shortly thereafter, as will be industrial society and large swaths of humanity, if not from the weapon effects themselves then from climate effects, famine, disease, and general collapse of society. Without avgas, power, and spare parts and munitions, functioning avionics aren’t going to keep a bird flying.
Stranger
True, but in a MAD strategy wouldn’t you need your bombers to be able to remain active at least until they’ve delivered their nuclear bombs?
Well, to the extent that bombers are actually needed as a ‘mopping up’ force to take out anything not already wiped out by waves of ICBM and SLBM attacks, as well as intermediate range and cruise missiles for ‘battlefield’ targets. And as noted, nuclear delivery vehicles like the B-1 and B-2 bombers are hardened against EMP (as is, ostensibly, the F-35 although I find its survivability dubious given all of the other flaws and vulnerabilities if that system.)
Stranger
Yup, and reviewing with you wrote you did say they would be moot “shortly”, which should be taken to meant “after they delivered the Bomb”.
It seems to me that the biggest question is where you are, and that holds true more or less equally if you’re at cruising altitude or on the ground. If your location is one of the cities that gets targeted, you’re dead, either at 0’ or 30,000’. If you’re someplace where folks at ground level would survive, you probably will, too.
Are you certain about that? Because I’ve done some work in this area, and (AFAIK) they wear PLZT flash protection goggles when flying. They’ve been around for decades. Here is a pic from 2015.
If the plane gets a bit of warning, there’s probably an area in which you’re more likely to survive than people on the ground. You can turn away from the blast, and take the shockwave as a tailwind. You’ve increased the separation from ground zero by some amount prior to the shockwave hitting you, plus your airspeed relative to the shockwave will attenuate the effects by some amount.
People on the ground won’t have those options, and so there’s some zone in which they’d get it worse.
Looks like you’ve got the current info and I was speaking of current practice back when I was doing this stuff. Which is now pretty far into the history books. Far enough I should have done some Googling first.
So thanks for the correction / update.
But your cites do demonstrate my larger point that being airborne with line of sight to a nuke flash is a severe risk that USAF goes to great extents to defend against. A risk that airliners are helpless against.
That’s where the blinded pilots have to step aside and talented amateurs take the control trying to follow the instructions of the pilots.
This script practically writes itself!
(I once started to write a book that started somewhat like that (passengers and pilots in an airliner during WWIII), it was going to be a generational epic depicting the rebuilding of civilization from the ashes… I wrote about 10 pages and, as I usually did, abandoned it. I think I still have the yellowed, 30 years old pages somewhere)
And flying away from the blast site would also largely protect you from the flash.