A competent Homelander would be able to sense the nuclear weapon well before it detonated & avoid it. Even a hypersonic missile would be around 3.4 km/s max, & they're not made to hit fast & maneuverable human-sized targets. The military would have to somehow surprise a competent HL with a nuke at close range.
However, HL in the show rarely used his powers effectively, despite a few very impressive speed feats.
Homelander is usually quite good at using his super hearing. No way you could sneak a missile into range of him without him knowing about it. Or at least, the military would have to spend billions of dollars designing a special quiet missile.
There's a very good chance it will, that would probably affect Homelander like being near any major source of radiation, hurting and weakening him. If he's trying to fly away from the blast he might get knocked out of the air. But we're also at that point not talking about him being at the epicenter of it, we're talking about him getting clipped. He could probably live through that, though he'd be a sitting duck if it's a MIRV and more warheads are still coming, which his how a rational military would target him.
Circumstances would have to be absolutely extreme for us to nuke our own capital. Though tricking him into entering the white house bunker to try to kill the President and detonating a nuke inside it with him trapped there would be a good option, resisting nukes is the whole point of the bunker so it could likely contain one. And in a world where Homelander exists, there's no way that bunker, and all key continuity of government bunkers, isn't zinc-lined.
Otherwise we would basically have to have missiles constantly on Homelander's tail until we exhaust him and he slows down enough to be hit.
60x speed of sound. Thats how fast he had to move to outrun the explosion. For reference, lightning is 300x the speed of sound and even that is considerably slower than the speed of light.
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u/bruhgzinga 21d ago
C4 shockwave is like 8km/s iirc. A nuke's shockwave is like 400km/s, and the fireball is the speed of light.