Nope, I didn’t watch the video, and after your little rant, don’t actually think it’s worth my time. Particularly the part about “normal layman’s understanding.” Lay off the condescending attitude.

Let’s start with some basics. A nuclear weapon is, essentially an uncontrolled, run-away nuclear reaction. The blast wave is creating by the interaction of the EM release with whatever is around it. In air, it’s an explosive blast wave, as the air turns to superheated plasma and suddenly starts expanding.

In vacuum, there’s nothing and it’s pretty much mostly just an EM pulse- there’s still plasma and stuff, but it’s a lot less, so the EMP is far stronger than the physical blast wave.

The energy released from that is mostly in the blast and shockwave, about 50%. In atmosphere that is incredibly destructive. In space, far less so.

Roughly 35% of the total energy release is in the form of heat. We’ll get back to that.

Around 5% is ionizing radiation- though that’s higher in a neutron bomb, with another 5-10% in residual radiation.

That is what we’re talking about when we say “nuclear weapon.” You might be inclined to include Project Excalibur here, it compared to an EMP blast, it’s overkill for what it would kill, and I’m not convinced it would be precise enough to hit something the size of a minivan- or a water melon.

Even the nuke-pumped xray lasers suffer from basic physics- the vast majority of its energy is still released as in a typical nuclear detonation. The lasing media lasts just long enough to convert a small fraction of that into a laser. It’s soul advantage is being able to engage across line of sight.

Such a device is simply not an ASAT weapon, and in any case, remains purely hypothetical.

If we actually start making the types of warheads that will be useful in space, rather than eliminating an entire city, and wasting most of the energy, we can easily mount those warheads on already existing weapons platforms to shoot down any satellite or spaceship with a nuke if we want to.

1. See the definition of a nuclear explosion.
2. A nukes energy is extremely difficult to contain never mind control. It literally vaporizes things near enough to it. In space, “near enough” becomes a lot smaller
3. The closest thing humanity has ever built to a “spaceship” is either the ISS, Skylab, or Mir stations and the orbital transports like the shuttles; the Soyuz, Dragon and Apollo capsules. Are you seriously suggesting nukes as a means to attack any of them?

If they launch ships, we can make nuclear warheads that we haven’t made specifically for space combat that won’t go boom so much as transfer as much energy as possible, to totally overheat and destroy the ships.

What fantasy do you live in? Warships in space aren’t a thing. Because they’re too expensive, too vulnerable and too useless. Russia is absolutely not deploying a space navy.

As I’ve been trying to say this entire time, Putin is trying to launch nukes to use the EMP to knock out the hundreds of western satellites that are in orbit above and around Russia.

To take out satellites, it wouldn’t take much of a nuke, a single Starfish Prime test was only 1.4 MT, and would wreck havoc on today’s orbital infrastructure.