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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I imagine that's why the other person qualified their remark as referring to "macroscopic" objects.

Hmm, good point. Maybe small objects not quite close enough to a hydrogen bomb to be vaporized by the flash, then?

Related: the "nuclear manhole cover" [1] (actually a 900 kg piece of armor plate) which may have accelerated to several times Earth's escape velocity over the course of a few meters (tens of millions of g's which is definitely impressive for such a heavy object). It was likely vaporized due to compressive heating before escaping Earth's atmosphere, however.

(I'm rather amused by the idea that some manager type evidently thought that a hunk of steel might contain a nuclear explosion in what was in essence a very large cannon!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#Missing_ste...

A big enough hunk of steel can certainly contain a nuclear explosion.

At 900 kg, we're talking about a fairly small hunk.

A big enough anything can certainly contain any explosion.

If were going off on a tangent to nuclear explosions why not supernova: XKCD What if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

Quotable quote: "However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that."

The following paragraph to that quote is a great demonstration of that point.

Like the borehole cap on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob Pascal-B

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