Hey, I have been researching a lot over the past few days over nuclear bombs and have been wondering about something. If a megaton hydrogen bomb was detonated two miles away at ground level, will a fish tank shatter through two and a half feet of concrete? I saw an article similar to this on this website 5 years ago and now have chosen this as my question answering community, so expect similar question soon.
Just one megaton?
Probably not, no.
In a sealed room, or vented to the outside?
Sorry forgot to mention two feet underground, completely sealed. Also will it survive a twenty megaton?
Try Nukemap, which lets you calculate a nuclear blast’s damage anywhere in the U.S.
I chose Wichata, KS (nice and flat) and detonated a 20MT warhead on the surface. It showed a fireball radius of 2.59 miles and a 20 psi air blast (“heavily built concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished”) of 3.67 miles, so your fish should be completely cooked, even underground.
Sorry, I was thinking in kilotons. Yeh, a megaton would do dozens of miles of damage. The fish tank at two miles away would probably be vaporized along with the concrete.
In a sealed, underground concrete bunker. The fish tank should survive quite well.
A nuke is usually detonated at an altitude above ground level. The ground transmitted forces dissipate in a short distance.
A sealed structure that does not deform to any great extent, does not transmit the forces to the interior. Even if the internal pressure increased, the fish tank is open at the top. No reason to shatter. It would take the collapse of a wall, with an inrush of pressure to one side of the tank, to smash it.
Of course, we’re overlooking the obvious.
In 1965 the U.S. tested an 80 kiloton bomb on the island of Amchitka. The underground test produced an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter Scale.
Now, since your basic one megaton bomb will have 12.5x the boom of the Amchitka bomb, and a 20 megaton would have 20 times that much, we can guess that an explosion on the surface will shake the ground considerably.
In this video they subject a 60-gallon aquarium to a 7.3 earthquake. The fish tank loses. Therefore, it’s entirely possible that even if the fishtank in the bunker survived the actual blast, the resulting earthquake could knock it over.
The Castle Bravo test produced an unexpected 15 megaton blast. It left a 6000 foot wide, 250 foot deep crater. The firing crew was about 20 nautical miles away. Their bunker held. They waited for radiation to drop and evacuated.