Could you survive a nuclear blast in a fridge?

The full story

The episode's narration, word for word. Numbers link to the sources below; timestamps play that moment.

Hide in the fridge 0:00

A siren is wailing, and an atomic bomb is minutes from going off ^1,2. The only shelter to hand is a refrigerator in a mock house ^1,2. So you climb in, pull the door shut, and hope. Could that possibly work? It sounds like a joke, but one of the film's own makers says scientists gave it even odds ³. So let's do what he says his scientists did, and check.

What happens on screen 0:28

In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, released in 2008 and set in 1957, Indy escapes into a model town at a desert test site, minutes before an atomic test ^1,2. The siren is blaring, the houses are fake, and he folds himself into a lead-lined refrigerator ^1,2. The blast sends the fridge hurtling across the desert, under a rising mushroom cloud ^4,1. It lands, and he tumbles out ¹. Within days, fans had a new phrase for a story going too far: nuking the fridge ^1,5.

Blame me 1:05

In 2011, the director Steven Spielberg told Empire magazine: blame me, don't blame George, that was my silly idea ⁴. And he said he was proud that the phrase nuked the fridge had caught on ⁴. A few months later, George Lucas, who co-wrote the story, told The New York Times that Spielberg was just protecting him ^3,4,2. Lucas said he'd built a dossier on the fridge, about six inches thick ³. His verdict: if the fridge was lead-lined, if Indy didn't break his neck when it landed, and if he could get the door open, he could survive ³. The odds, from a lot of scientists, he said, were about fifty-fifty ³.

Doom Town was real 1:49

The fake town wasn't invented for the film ^6,7. In 1953 and 1955, the United States set off bombs on towers in the Nevada desert, with real houses built nearby to see what would happen to them ⁶. The 1955 shot, called Apple-2, was about twenty-nine kilotons, on a tower five hundred feet tall ^6,7. Its houses held mannequins and canned food, and some people called it Doom Town ^7,8. No source we found gives the bomb's size or the fridge's distance, so we'll borrow Apple-2 as our stand-in.

A wall of air 2:25

Back in episode five we met the blast wave: a sudden jump in pressure, with a gale right behind it, about two hundred and sixty kilometres an hour at five pounds per square inch ⁶. What matters for the fridge is how far away that is.

How far is far 2:43

How far away do you have to be? Glasstone and Dolan's handbook, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, gives the answer for a one-kiloton blast, and a rule for scaling it ⁶. A given pressure reaches out in proportion to the cube root of the yield, so twenty-nine kilotons pushes every ring about three times further ⁶. For our stand-in, five pounds per square inch lands about one point four kilometres from ground zero ⁶. That's the ring where ordinary houses fall down ⁶.

What the fridges did 3:16

In 1953, the house standing at about five pounds per square inch was almost completely destroyed ⁶. In 1955, a brick house at the same pressure was damaged beyond repair, and part of its roof landed fifteen metres behind it ⁶. And the fridge? The engineers reported that in the collapsed brick house, the upset gas refrigerator was probably still usable, although largely buried in debris ⁶. The fridge survived, but it fell over; it didn't fly ⁶.

The first shove 3:50

Let's put our own fridge on that ring. Say it's a hundred kilos of steel with an eighty-kilo person inside, and its front is a metre and a half tall and seventy-five centimetres wide. When the shock hits, the front face takes the full slap, more than double the passing pressure, because the moving air piles up against it ⁶. For a few thousandths of a second, before the wave wraps round to the back, that's about nine tonnes of force ⁶. That's a shove of about fifty times the weight of the fridge and its passenger ⁶.

Riding the wind 4:25

Then the wind takes over, and a heavy box gains speed slowly, like a sail rather than a bullet ⁶. We worked out how fast the wind can push our fridge before it dies away, about a second later ⁶. The answer is roughly seven metres a second, and that's generous, because we ignored the floor and the house around it ⁶. At five pounds per square inch, the fridge gets knocked over and slides a few metres ⁶.

The dummy test 4:53

Is that sum believable? At one nuclear test, researchers stood up a seventy-five-kilo dummy with its back to the blast, at a little over five pounds per square inch ⁶. It reached just over six metres a second, after travelling under three metres in half a second ⁶. A dummy lying flat didn't move at all ⁶. Our method, run on that dummy, lands in the same range, and if that test was as big as ours, about a third too fast. So if anything, our fridge numbers are on the generous side ⁶.

Into the sky 5:29

So for the fridge to go hurtling across the desert, we need to move it much closer. A flight of a hundred metres needs a launch speed of at least thirty-one metres a second, a hundred and thirteen kilometres an hour ⁶. Our fridge only reaches that at about thirteen pounds per square inch ⁶. For our stand-in bomb, that's around eight hundred metres from ground zero ⁶.

What comes down 5:53

Now Lucas's second if: the landing ³. The handbook is blunt: being thrown can hurt, but the stop is by far the bigger danger ⁶. By the handbook's tentative figures, for a whole-body impact with something hard, deaths begin at just over six metres a second, and half are fatal at about sixteen ⁶. Our fridge lands at thirty-one ⁶. If its steel crumples thirty centimetres, the stop averages about a hundred and seventy times the pull of gravity ⁶. And Indy isn't strapped in. Even a fridge that only rose ten metres would come down at fourteen metres a second ⁶.

A crumb of comfort 6:33

In fairness to the film, the handbook offers one hope, from tests of things dropped from moving vehicles ⁶. Its authors concluded that a person tumbling over a smooth surface, free of rocks, might survive even a fast start, if he avoided head injury and didn't flail his limbs ⁶. But Indy isn't rolling free across the sand. He's loose inside a steel box that is doing the hitting ⁶.

The door 7:00

Lucas's third if was the door ³. That was a real worry in the nineteen-fifties, because fridges latched shut from the outside, and children who hid in them were trapped ⁹. In 1956, Congress passed the Refrigerator Safety Act: a new fridge had to open from the inside ¹⁰. It applied to fridges made after the thirtieth of October 1958 ¹¹. And it's largely why fridge doors now close with magnets ⁹. A fridge from 1957 would most likely still have had an outside latch ⁹.

The flash 7:35

Now the one Lucas didn't mention, and here the fridge does well. About a third of the bomb's energy leaves as a flash of heat and light, spreading out and thinning with the square of the distance ⁶. At one point four kilometres, our stand-in delivers about thirty-three calories on every square centimetre ⁶. Just a few calories per square centimetre can blister bare skin ⁶. But a closed steel box, packed with insulation and standing inside a house, is likely a pretty good heat shield.

The invisible part 8:09

Then there's the radiation you can't see ⁶. In its first minute, a fission bomb sends out gamma rays, and at one point four kilometres our stand-in delivers about a thousand rads ⁶. The handbook says a whole-body dose of a thousand rads would probably prove fatal in nearly all cases, though not for a few days ⁶. At eight hundred metres, where the fridge actually flies, it's more than ten thousand ⁶. That's what Lucas's lead was for.

How much lead? 8:39

Lead does stop gamma rays, a slab at a time ⁶. By the handbook's rule of thumb, which plays it safe, each layer of about nine centimetres cuts the dose to a tenth ^6,12,13. To bring a thousand rads down to twenty-five, below which doctors would see no effects, you'd need something like nine to fourteen centimetres of lead lining the whole cabinet: roughly four and a half to five and a half tonnes of it ^6,12,14. A thin lining of three millimetres would let about nine tenths through ^6,12,14. And a fridge that heavy, at thirteen pounds per square inch, barely moves ^6,14. And the bomb's neutrons are a separate problem: they're best slowed by light atoms, like the hydrogen in water, not by lead alone ⁶.

A film that did its homework 9:25

If you want the version that took the science seriously, there's Threads, a 1984 BBC film about a nuclear attack on Sheffield ^15,16. Its director, Mick Jackson, spent a year travelling the US and the UK, talking to scientists, doctors and defence experts ¹⁵. It's a much harder watch than any Indiana Jones film. Looking back twenty-five years later, The Scotsman called its picture of the aftermath all too plausible ¹⁵.

So, fifty-fifty? 9:55

So, could you survive a nuclear blast in a fridge? It would keep off the heat ⁶. But a fridge light enough to fly can't carry the lead, and a fridge with the lead won't fly ⁶. And the one light enough to fly still has to land ⁶. Fifty-fifty is generous, but the real fridge in Doom Town's collapsed brick house came through, on its side under the rubble, probably still usable ⁶. It's a cartoon gag in a pulp adventure, and Spielberg says he's proud the phrase caught on ⁴. Next time, a trick every crime show loves: why can't you enhance a blurry photo?

Sources

Every factual claim in the episode is tied to one of these. Spotted an error? Tell us.

1. Sarah Ball, "'Jump the Shark,' Meet 'Nuke the Fridge'", Newsweek, issue of 7–14 July… — web.archive.org
2. Wikipedia, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (plot summary and… — en.wikipedia.org
3. Bryan Curtis, "George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits", The New York Times… — nytimes.com
4. Helen O'Hara, "Spielberg: More Indy & Jurassic Park?", Empire, 26 October 2011,… — web.archive.org
5. Wikipedia, "Jumping the shark", section Nuking the fridge — en.wikipedia.org
6. Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan (eds), The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd… — fourmilab.ch
7. Wikipedia, "Operation Teapot", section Apple-2, 2015) — en.wikipedia.org
8. Tanfer Emin Tunç, "Eating in Survival Town: Food in 1950s Atomic America", Cold War… — doi.org
9. Wikipedia, "Refrigerator death", section Refrigerator Safety Act — en.wikipedia.org
10. Refrigerator Safety Act, Public Law 84-930, 70 Stat. 953, 2 August 1956 (15 U.S.C.… — cpsc.gov
11. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 16, Part 1750, "Standard for devices to permit the… — ecfr.gov
12. J. H. Hubbell and S. M. Seltzer, X-Ray Mass Attenuation Coefficients, NIST Standard… — physics.nist.gov
13. J. H. Hubbell and S. M. Seltzer, X-Ray Mass Attenuation Coefficients, NIST Standard… — physics.nist.gov
14. International Atomic Energy Agency, Radiation Protection in the Design of Radiotherapy… — www-pub.iaea.org
15. "End of the world revisited: BBC's Threads is 25 years old", The Scotsman, 5 September… — web.archive.org
16. Wikipedia, "Threads (1984 film)" (orientation only) — en.wikipedia.org

Researched and scripted with AI assistance, fact-checked claim by claim, with synthetic narration and diagrams drawn in code. How we make episodes.