Indiana Jones and the Interplanetary Space Drive

Early on in the latest Indiana Jones installment, Dr. Jones survives the blast from a nuclear explosion by hiding in a lead-lined fridge. Oddly enough, this may be one of the more realistic stunts in the movie. When we think of nuclear explosions, we tend to imagine a fireball that annihilates absolutely everything within a certain radius. But in fact it is possible for man-made objects to survive an atomic blast, relatively intact, in even the heart of the nuclear explosion. During a 1954 15-megaton atomic bomb test, two steel balls covered in graphite were hung from the bomb tower. Incredibly the balls survived—but were thrown a considerable distance from the bomb site. This led scientists, including the famed Freeman Dyson, to consider the possibility of using nuclear bombs to propel spacecraft through space. A stream of relatively low-power bombs would be shot out behind the spacecraft, and as each ...