This reminds me of an incident that proves even geniuses can do stupid and foolish things. During the Trinity nuclear tests, Richard Feynman opted to not to wear the special eye protection that was being issued. He thought the windshield in truck was enough to block the UV rays. He was damn lucky he wasn’t permanently blinded.
Yeah, it would depend on the nature of the warning the pilots get. If Air Traffic Control broadcasts that attack warnings have been issued, they might have time to turn away from the nearest, most probable target, like the nearest large city.
But even if the only warning is the flash, if at least one of them was protected enough to keep flying, they’ll have some small amount of time in which to react, if they figure out what’s happening.
Already been done…twice!
Stranger
But they are not blind, they just should’ve have had the lasagna…
Yeah, it was a stretch. I just really wanted to link that video.
Stranger
(I should’ve added that it’s a different type of problem altogether…)
In both cases it’s a really shitty situation.
It is still reproduced in the historical documents.
Didn’t he have a sound reason for doing this? I thought that windshields were manufactured in a way that filters out most UV light, even in 1945. Feynman didn’t go blind, so apparently his thinking was correct.
You are going to need to land before you run out of fuel. Most safe places for that will be already destroyed, and there are not going to be a lot of options. Most airfields will not be fit for landing on, and you probably don’t want to be there anyway, in case there is a second strike. Oh, and being up in the air will expose you to a Lot more radiation than if you were on the ground surrounded by hills and other terraine.
It would look like you are about to die soon.
The skin of the aircraft will protect against everything but gammas (which are mostly going to be a prompt emission during the blast, and if you are close enough to get zapped by gammas you are probably dead from blast effects anyway) and the air filtration system should take out the large particulates from fallout. But yes, you’re going to have to find somewhere to land sooner or later and it probably won’t be a military base or large civil airport. Fortunately, most military aircraft can land at regional airport-length airfields as long as you don’t care about taking off again, or if you can find a straight bit of three lane highway without an overpass you should be able to land. Your next trick is to find shelter, uncontaminated and potable water, and eventually a food source, which probably means joining up with a group.
If you are downwind of heavy fallout or are in the path of masses of surviving refugees, you are pretty fucked regardless of what you do. Save a bullet for yourself because bleeding out through every orifice or being savaged by an angry mob is not a pleasant or quick exit from this mortal coil.
Stranger
No problem. Thanks, actually.
The OP started from the premise of a local exchange. Overflying India & Pakistan while they decide to go at it.
That suggests plenty of fuel to fly out of range of the conflict assuming they can fly beyond the borders before getting unlucky enough to be too close to any one blast. Landing elsewhere ought to be no big deal.
For sure if the whole world starts expending their entire arsenal finding a place to at least land safely will be harder. Ironically, being over e.g. Pakistan westbound bound for e.g. London when the festivities start would be better than being over the central USA at the same time.
There are plenty of locations in e.g. northern Africa that are not likely to be targeted and are well within the fuel range remaining. Whereas not too many in the USA.
You’ll often hear the residents of some random small town in the US talking about how the local whatever-it-is factory was so important, that it put the town on the list of Soviet ICBM targets. Which is partly just hometown pride, of course, but when Russia has ~6000 nukes, even with the high-priority targets getting multiple weapons aimed at them, there’s still plenty of room for targeting rinky-dink towns, too. Allowing for those redundantly-targeted high priorities, that’s around 100 per state. The 100th biggest city in Ohio, for instance, is Steubenville, at a population of 18,029.
Also, because the area of effect of nuclear weapons is large enough against civilian targets that multiple towns can be in the same danger zone.
I recall a Cold War general saying that towns in Western Europe were “half a kiloton apart” (one of the creepier standards of measurement I’ve run across). Nukes are too indiscriminate for there to be a real distinction between targets that are even in the same general region.
Surely you can’t be serious
Airports, especially those that are joint military / civilian airports will have large craters in their runways. I’d expect ATC to be out/dead (at least those at the airport, maybe Center is up), GPS to be wonky at best with at least some of those satellites most likely knocked out. While the ground based navaids would have generator power will they survive the EMP; for that matter, how many of the plane’s systems get fried in the pulse? What about other planes that were closer? This is going to be some true IFR (I Follow Roads) flying.
Is there any procedure for if an airport it out? Do you just turn approach frequency into a CTAF? Head on a swivel looking for other planes that may not have radios, while gaping at the ‘new’ city skyline in shock & awe, while also looking for a suitable large cornfield to attempt a landing. I’m assuming there will be traffic, or at least vehicles on the interstates making them unsuitable emergency landing strips.
The best option would be to be in a plane early on in a transcontinental flight so you have a lot of fuel to go somewhere else in the world. After that, one might be better off in a bush plane with limited electronics & the ability to land almost anywhere rather than a heavy that’s already starting it’s descent.
Even if you weren’t blinded looking out your window, or the EMP disabled your plane, or the pilots weren’t blinded by the blast, you’ve still got the matter of getting to the ground. You’d have to hope that there is still some semblance of traffic control and that there is an airport that hasn’t been reduced to rubble. I think the lucky ones in such a situation would be those who were vaporized at the outset.
Russia has ~5,500 nuclear weapons but of these only about 1700 are currently deployed on strategic launch systems, with another ~2,600 in a reserve/nondeployed status. In a comprehensive nuclear exchange, most or all of the deployed weapons will be delivered to points of strategic value; national leadership, military bases where nuclear or strategic assets are based or maintained, fuel depots, critical industrial and electrical power infrastructure, major transportation hubs, and large population centers. There is no need to bomb small or even mid-sized cities that are not of critical industrial or military importance because the collapse of civil authority and food/fuel supply lines will assure that residents will be disorganized, facing famine and disease, and incapable of mass mobilization.
If we take a realistic review of nuclear wargaming scenarios over the last sixty years, once weapons start flying parties are disincentivized to hold back on any weapons they can readily deploy out of fear of having those weapons taken out, so even a ‘small scale’ regional conflict or battlefield use of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons is prone to spiraling out into a global exchange and destruction of virtually all industrial economy globally, even in nations that aren’t directly targeted as global supply lines collapse. Even nations that have all of the energy, mineral, and agricultural resources to be nominally self-sustaining are dependent upon manufactured items and expert knowledge that would come from one of the affected industrial nations, forcing a contraction of their industries until such a time as they can produce manufactured components and develop expertise domestically.
At over 20,000 km altitude GPS sats are going to take a lot of effort to take out and probably not a priority during a nuclear exchange as ballistic missiles use inertial guidance. However, without regular updates from the ground segment to ephemerides and relativistic adjustments they are going to experience progressive degradation in accuracy, and over a period of weeks will probably become completely unusable. That won’t impact anyone in the air during the initial exchange but could impact plans for extended retribution strikes, assuming that capacity would even exist.
Stranger
Heh, I remember reading a scenario that was (IIRC) done by the CIA in the 80s where in the event of a general exchange a Soviet sub sitting in the Gulf of Mexico would lob a bunch of nukes over what was basically rural north central Texas, trying to use air bursts to hit B-52s that would have taken off from Randolph AFB and headed north over the pole.
So yeah, during the 80s it seemed everyone would be going all Oprah with the nukes.
But that’s the point. Every small town has something that could be vaguely considered “vital industrial infrastructure”, and with that many weapons available, you’re going to lower your standards of what counts as “vital” pretty far.