All spacecraft will have some radiation shielding because of the environment they operate in, although neutron radiation (probably the biggest killer) generally does not occur in nature. It is possible to armor against this radiation, reducing the lethal range by an order of magnitude or more. Larger weapons will have greater lethal ranges, scaled with the square root of weapon yield. Even a 1 kT nuclear weapon will inflict a lethal dose of radiation on an unprotected human out to about 20 km, depending on the type of weapon. However, there is another mechanism by which nuclear weapons do damage in space, namely radiation poisoning of the crew. This makes them essentially point-attack weapons, given the scale at which spacecraft maneuver. They still obey the inverse square law, and are not likely to be effective against mass objects such as spacecraft beyond a few kilometers, depending on the yield of the device. In space, the X-rays are not absorbed and instead go on to damage the target directly. The superheated air then expands and produces the shockwave. The flaw is that the shockwave is not a property of the device itself, but instead results from the absorption by the air of the X-rays emitted by the device. An alternative is that the damage will be inflicted by the plasma that used to be the device casing. The logic behind this theory is that in the atmosphere, most of the damage comes from the shockwave, which obviously cannot propagate in space. There are several myths about nuclear weapon use in space, the most common of which is that they are ineffective if not in contact with the target. The most common alternative weapons described for space warfare are nuclear in nature. All other proposed weapons suffer from serious problems which render them ineffective compared to lasers and kinetics. Lasers and kinetics are standard reference weapons, and for good reason.
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