What Happens if You Nuke a Can of Beer?

Are you relying on fragile, everyday items to protect your family’s resources in a catastrophe? When international tensions rise and nuclear posture becomes a headline once again, the question of long-term survival logistics isn't just academic—it’s practical.

In this episode of Dismantling Disaster, we move past the doom-and-gloom rhetoric to look at the hard science of resilience. From the 1950s "Operation Teapot" tests, where researchers buried beer and soda at the Nevada Test Site to see if they could survive a nuclear blast, to the startling 100-year-old case of a tin can of veal surviving from the 1820s, we examine what truly keeps your supplies safe.

We break down the engineering behind protective packaging, the reality of "overpressure" in blast zones, and why your current "disaster backpack" might be failing you due to simple, preventable mistakes—like the "plastic water bottle trap" I recently uncovered in a NYC attorney’s kit. Learn why modern preservation isn't just about stockpiling; it’s about understanding the physics of your gear and maintaining a reliable, high-utility pantry.

Inside this episode:
00:00 - The Reality of Modern Nuclear Tensions
02:15 - Operation Teapot: Nuking Coca-Cola and Beer
05:30 - The Nevada Test Site: Training for the Unthinkable
08:15 - "Pimp My Backpack": Identifying the Failures in Your Kit
10:45 - The Plastic Water Bottle Trap: Why Your Hygiene is at Risk
13:30 - Shrapnel and Overpressure: How Containers Actually Fail in a Blast
15:45 - The 1820s Veal Can: 100 Years of Food Preservation
18:20 - Why You Should Never Heat Food Directly in Modern Cans
20:10 - The "Par Level" Strategy: Building a Resilient Home Pantry

Make sure you are subscribed to the channel to catch our ongoing series on disaster engineering, including our upcoming deep dives into real-world gear testing and the "Pimp My Backpack" segments.

Empowerment Architecture means refusing to rely on flimsy, improper storage as your survival strategy. Prepare for a disaster, and you'll never experience one.

#DismantlingDisaster #DisasterPatrick #EmergencyPreparedness #NuclearSafety #Logistics #SurvivalGear #FoodStorage #OperationTeapot #PrepSmart #EmpowermentArchitecture

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Hey guys, disaster Patrick here. And just a few days ago, I was reading in the news about how the United States is reconsidering its nuclear posture. So we're discussing testing. That's one of things the administration was talking about. And so as a result, there have been a ratcheting up of international tensions with Russia because they are also considering, as of the time of this recording, ending their test ban and where they're actually going to begin testing underground nuclear weapons again. And I studied international politics as an undergraduate, and one of the things that has happened throughout the nuclear age is that the two major nuclear superpowers, which obviously is the United States and Russia, sometimes they begin to ratchet up tensions, and then it becomes more and more important that they have international dialogue in order to get it back down again. And right now, because of what's going on in Ukraine, that's made it exceedingly difficult. That's an incredibly complicating factor for them. But that's for someone else's podcast. When I heard about this, though, I was thinking about nuclear preparedness. And you guys know me by now. I don't do the doom and gloom thing. I don't do the blood and guts thing. I don't do the apocalyptic stuff, and I have always stuck to that because I just feel like why should we have to do that when we can be educated about it and feel strong about it, feel confident about it. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about a story that I was looking forward to telling you, and I just couldn't find a podcast episode to tell you about it. So this is going to be my opportunity to do that. In 1955, US Army was involved in something called Operation Teapot. And Teapot was unique because essentially what they were doing was they were nuking different drinks. They were nuking Coca-Cola, they were nuking, nuking beers of various kinds because they wanted to see how they would be impacted. What they wanted to test was would these beverages be potable, meaning drinkable? Could they be drinkable after a nuclear explosion? So here's what they did, okay? So they took these, they took these bottles, they said, of soft drinks and beers, and they buried them underground at the Nevada test site. So many of you don't know this, but I trained at the Nevada test site when I was first an emergency professional. The Department of Homeland Security has a site out there where they train people on how to respond to a nuclear accident. And I don't want to get into too many tributaries, but this is a statistic that you can live with that I think you'll find very interesting. In all of the years, all of the decades that the United States has been transporting nuclear materials, there hasn't been a single incidental release of nuclear materials on American roadways. Not one. Zero. And that's because they have put so many precautions in place. And when I was doing hazardous materials, which is the reason why I was actually in that class, was that they wanted to make sure that there was not an incidental release of nuclear materials into the water, into the air, because what would happen is it would not only get people sick, but because of the nature of nuclear materials, it would cause citywide, statewide, national panic. So if I were to tell you, and today I don't have the ability to do that, I'll create a video in the future if you if you're interested, and I'll lay out for you how we package up nuclear materials. And when you watch that video, you will see how well we ensure that no one can break into those materials, and if there is an there's a truck overturned, there's no way that that material is going to be released. It's that hard. Okay, so at the nuclear test site, some of you may wonder where it is. It's near Las Vegas, it's about an hour north of Vegas. So when I did this class, here's where it went. So they put us in hotel rooms in Vegas, which was cool. And then, and you stayed that you know, you flew in, you stayed the night, you woke up in the morning, and then there were buses out there, and you got on the buses. They gave you a predetermined location. You get on the buses, and the buses take you to the Nevada test site about an hour away. And it's in a really kind of a dusty area, obviously, would make sense. And it for those of you asking, it's not actively radioactive, so it isn't like you know you step out of the bus and you've got to wear like the hazmat suits or anything. That's not the way it works. But it is a place where there is active training going on with responders because we still need to know how to respond to a nuclear release if one is if ever occurs, whether it's intentional or unintentional. And so we get out there and it's like a tumbleweed town. I mean, it's really in the middle of nowhere, but you get an idea, and they have all these bunkers and things, and they were showing us an area, there was an area of the test range where Operation Teapot had gone on, where they had buried these beverages underground, detonated a nuclear weapon, and then pulled them out to see what effect they would have on the drink. And what is interesting is that the beverages were still drinkable. They were still drinkable. They tested them and determined that there were no hazardous radiation located in any of them. And they were entirely drinkable. With one exception, the taste was slightly modified. And some people who drank the beers said that the taste was different than a usual beer. And what they actually, to be more specific, they said it tasted like an aged beer. And the people who tasted the soft drinks said that it tasted like it was essentially old cola. So it was like as if you were to take, say, a bottle of, you know, Coke or Pepsi or something, or Dr. Pepper, and you just stuck it in your pantry and you left it there for like 20 years and drank it. And by the way, I've done that. I've actually had Coca-Cola, not nuked Coca-Cola, but I've had Coca-Cola that was in a prepper's pantry. I had a friend of mine, he's a prepper in Nebraska, and uh he told me that he had left a you know two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola in his prepper cabinet. It was in a it was in an underground bunker, and it was like one of these old army bunkers, and he pulled it out and we tasted it, and it tasted funny, but it was fine. I mean, I don't I'm not personally I'm not a soda drinker, I don't like soda very much, so I don't drink it. But I did when I was a kid. I drank it when I was a kid, and so I knew what it tastes like, and he was right. It did have kind of an aged feeling to it, and so when I learned about Operation Teapot while I was training, then I discovered that the beer essentially was completely drinkable in those impacts. So I will say to you, it is incredibly important to think about how you are going to store beverages during a disaster, not just during a nuclear incident during any disaster. Okay, so recently, you know, you may see a video. It's if if if you're watching this. So I have a video that's coming out. It's a brand new segment, and it's based on that TV show, Pip My Ride. And those of you who remember, Pip My Ride was a famous TV show that was on MTV, and I found out just to get into another tributary, I just found out MTV is is off the air, which was sort of surprising to me. It was on MTV, and the essential premise of the show was that these people who had these really junky cars, I mean, they drove these horrible cars, the kind of cars that like, you know, you had to like jerry work the key a little bit to even get the doors open. Sometimes the trunks were a mess, all that stuff. The host of it was a was a guy named Exhibit. He was a musician, a rapper, I think. And anyways, they would take it to this sort of specialized body shop and they would fix it all up. It was like super exaggerated. So they would take a van, and you know, like if the guy said, Well, yeah, I want a place where I can do my DJing, you know, they would, and he had this old like a ratty old van. They would like fix the van up so that so that and it would be rigged so that you could like set up a DJ system, and they set up a DJ system in this guy's van. Just like that. So what I've done is I decided that I was going to do one based on that with disaster backpacks. So what I'm doing is I'm taking disaster backpacks, and I can't tell you the number of backpacks I've seen in my career, these disaster backpacks, that are in crazy condition. And so, what I'm gonna do is I'm talking to people saying, hey, listen, do you want me to take your backpack and and totally what we call pimping it out? And it's not called pimp my backpack, but it has a cool name. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put all brand new kinds of equipment in there. So I filmed my first episode of that in New York, in New York City, and so here's the premise. I was talking to this guy, I was on a podcast, uh, he's a New York attorney, and he's very New York. In fact, his podcast is all about being a New Yorker, and he asked me to come on. I didn't even contact him. See, I have podcast agents, like I have people who look for podcasts for me to join as guests, and this guy that didn't happen. In this case, this guy just randomly reached out to me and he said, Listen, I heard you on podcast so-and-so, and I'd love to have you on my podcast. And I said, Great, let's find a day. So we found a day and we set up the time for the recording. So this hasn't happened to me before. Okay, so we're on the podcast, and the podcast is an hour long. All right, so I'm talking to him like I'm talking to you right now. So we're talking and talking and talking, and literally he asks me this question about emergency preparedness, and I can see him on the screen in front of me because obviously I wasn't in person with him, so um, so I'm recording with him, and while I'm answering the question, I see him go off camera. He just leaves, like he doesn't say anything, he just rolls out, and so I'm wondering what's happening, and I'm trying to keep it going. So I'm I'm still narrating my answer, and I'm trying to kind of elongate it a bit so so that we don't have any dead air. And he comes back with this radio backpack and he's like, I have my disaster kit in here, and I want you to evaluate it. So he pulls out this backpack and he pulls out all these supplies, like out of there. Like, and he had all kinds of stuff. All kinds all he had all kinds of stuff, and I'm not gonna say what all of it was, but I am gonna say one thing, he had this in there. He had a little bottle of alcohol, just like this one, in his backpack. And I talk about alcohol and backpacks, we're not getting into that today, but I will say this the alcohol he had in there was really high quality stuff. It was very expensive type of alcohol. And I thought that was sort of interesting. But I don't want to get too much into that. But what I will say is that he had all these supplies in there and he had this one thing, he had this plastic water bottle in there. Okay, so he had this plastic water bottle, and he told me that what he would do is is he would he drank from it because it used to have like some kind of a fizzy drink in there. So he drank the fizzy drink and he finished it, and then he was filling it up with water, and he was closing the lid up, and he had it at like one of those side pouches, you know, like we we've seen those all in backpacks, the little side webbing where people can put some kind of a water bottle, and that's what he did. He had that in the water bottle. And I asked him how long it'd been there, and he was like, months. And I said, Well, you're not telling the tell me it's been there for months. And he's like, No, it's not. He's like, what I've been doing is I I I fill it up and then I leave it in there, and if I there's no disaster, which hasn't happened, then what I do is I just take the I just undo the top, I unscrew the top, and I pour the water into the plants, and then I just refill it, rescrew in the top and I put it back into the backpack. And I was like, well, there's all kinds of bacteria in there because you know you've already drank out of it, things like that. And I didn't want him to feel bad because he actually did a really good job with a lot of the other things he did in the backpack. We I just really pumped up the volume on it because there was a lot of things. But one of the things I did do for him is I said, we're getting rid of this stupid plastic water bottle. Like we're junking it. We're getting rid of it. And so I got him a really nice, reusable one that I said, this is better, and one you can wash and want to remain sanitary and everything else, because water is important in a disaster. We understand this. I was I've been in disasters before where when I was a responder, where I actually used water purification tablets. And I will tell you that it may seem like, I mean, on the packaging on these things, may say, well, it doesn't impact the flavor of the water. It does. It does have an effect. It depends on the manufacturer. Some of them don't have as much of an effect as other ones do, but it does have an effect on the taste. No doubt. No doubt. So what they did was they made samples of these beers and soft drinks, and they just placed them at various distances from what we would sort of call ground zero. And the closest one was about 1200, 1,300 feet or so. I think the exact number is 1,270. So I think it was 1,270 feet away. And I will say this to you, I train EMTs sometimes about once a year, because I wrote part of the EMT textbook, the EMT Advanced Textbook, I wrote a part of the textbook about how to respond to detonations or explosions and weapons of mass destruction. And one of the problems that happens, it's not even in an atomic blast, in any kind of a blast, is what we call the overpressure, because the overpressure is what will break and compromise the containers. In other words, it's gonna smash it to pieces. But they had them underground, they had them in distances. So the failures to the bottles was primarily due to flying debris. Because obviously these things are moving incredibly rapidly, they're like a bunch of bullets. That's how I explain to EMTs. It's like, you know, when you whenever a container explodes, whether it's a pipe bomb or it's a modified M80, when the blast occurs, the shrapnel that's actually contained in the device. Like, right, so there's actual casing of the device. So, like if you think of like a grenade, for example, you know, you they have all that metallic outside. Those are designed specifically to cause injury. That's the whole point of the grenade. So those things being thrown in every direction is like a bullet being thrown in every direction. That's why those things are so effective and can hurt a lot of people in a short period of time. Anyway, most of the failure was due to these little pieces of shrapnel, so in other words, little pieces of the device itself striking it. Striking the bottle and breaking the bottle open. Or when the blast pressure like picked up a rock off the ground, which I can tell you, even in deserts, you can find little rocks around. And it would like pick up the rock because it was moving so fast, the wind was moving so fast, the blast pressure was so fast that it picked up the rock and it would strike the bottles. Happened a lot. So that's the only reason why most of these containers ended up failing. However, the liquid inside only contained mild, mild, mild radioactivity. And I'm gonna spare you the numbers because it doesn't really matter. But it was the radioactivity that was in it was considered reasonable for emergency use. So, in other words, like you're not gonna die from it. So, what they discovered was that the glass and metal containers actually shielded the inside of the liquid from the radioactivity. But the one thing they did find, as I said, was that the taste was a little bit off. Okay. So that's the reason so that's the reason why it's really valuable to have these really good sealed containers. Because when you have them contained like that, that beverages are remarkably resilient because of the way that they are manufactured, that they can withstand. This was the 1950s we're talking about. The bottles were protected. Imagine what they're like now, 2025. Right? So these things are incredibly protected. The main thing is making sure that that and it's just amazing because these containers can withstand can withstand a lot, but we have to prepare them in a certain way. But these kinds of but it just tells you the resilience not only of the packaging, but of the liquid inside and the way that it's manufactured is pretty extraordinary. And it's and it's more than just about bottles of beer. This one is about food. Okay, so this is the 1820s. 1820s. So 200 years ago from when this is being recorded. So Sir John Ross was trying to find the Northwest Passage, and when he was doing that, he had a lot of canned food. Canned food. Now, for us, that seems pretty tame, right? Because we've all had canned food before. We've had, you know, cans of soup and beans and vegetables or fruit or whatever. But then it was very different. About 25 years earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was the leader of France, decided that he wanted to find a way for food to be well preserved for long distances. Because he was intending for the Grand Armee, which was the French army, the Grand Armee was going to be traveling on long campaigns to Italy, to Russia, to North Africa, a lot of different places, and he wanted to have a reliable method for those logistics. Napoleon successfully and was really one of the first military leaders to realize that an army marches on its stomach. In fact, he coined that exact phrase, and we've all heard it before. So Napoleon, through the French government, commissioned for someone to create a reliable method for moving food long distances in a preserved state, and so a French confectioner came up with a way of doing it with glass. So essentially what he did was he put the food in there and then he had it boiled and then placed it underwater to see if it would be preserved, and it worked. And then an Englishman came up with a few years later, came up with a way of placing it in a can. Placing it in a tin can. And that's the canning process we know today. In fact, the way that they canned back in the 80s, the the other, I mean the technology has changed, the cans itself have changed, but the actual method, the way that they have canned, did hasn't changed at all. It's exactly the same way to preserve it. So Sir John Ross, on this voyage in the 1820s to find the Northwest Passage, he had a can in there. It was a can of veal. And you have to remember, this can of veal was canned in the 1820s. And when it was canned in the 1820s, they used that methodology that was first created for tin cans. It was the first, and this can was supposed to last all the way through this passage, so you know, months of exploring, being on a ship, and everything. Anyway, he finishes the passage and the can didn't get used, and it actually fell into the hands of a London scientific society, and they hid it away. And in the 1920s, a hundred years later, I think you know where I'm going with this, they opened up the tin can. They opened it. And you know what they did? They fed it to a cat. They actually fed it to a cat. And when they first opened it, see here's the deal. So they had the tin can. Unlike today, back when that when that can was given to John Ross, they did not have can openers. In the 1920s, they also did not have can openers. Can openers were not available. So at the time that at the time that this veal in the 1820s was canned, the can was incredibly thick. The lid was very thick. Because they hadn't invented the can opener. The can opener wouldn't be invented until decades later. So they had to use a hammer and chisel to get it open. So in the 1920s, 100 years after, they these British scientists had this can and they were banging it open using a hammer and chisel to get it open. And they got it open and they looked at the veal, and the veal looked fine. When they looked at the veal, they said the texture was fine, the color was correct, nothing was different about it. And then they fed it to a cat, and the cat had no ill effects whatsoever. The cat was perfectly fine. And so when I'm talking to people today about emergency preparedness and I discuss things about cans and canning, that is definitely a good way of preserving food, there is no doubt. And we have more modern ways of preserving food. So when I talk about emergency food, and you guys know I talk about emergency food all the time because I get asked about it constantly, that whenever I discuss emergency food these days, I talk about them in little packages because they're dried out. We have freeze drying now. There are a lot of ways of preserving food, and canning is still one of the ways of doing it. Now, I don't want you to be carrying around cans of beans in your disaster backpack. I do not advocate for that. However, I will say this when you are at home, having cans of food can be an incredibly valuable tool for you if you are sheltering in place for a long period of time at your home. And all you have to have is a can opener. So think about that. And you don't need one of these electrical ones, right? You can simply just have one of the manual ones and you're able to just stick it into the can and open it up. Couple words of warning though. And I mention this to people nowadays. There are, when I was in graduate school, I met a guy from the Middle East, and he had this can that he bought at one of the local stores. There was actually a co-op that was located near the university I was attending, and there were cans of soup, just like you would get here where I live in the United States. I live in California, there's plenty of canned foods everywhere. And he took it and he literally put it directly on the stove. And he turned the stove on and he cooked it directly in the can. And I'm gonna say to you, you can't do that. And I'll actually create a video on this because I've noticed that a couple of people have attempted this during disasters, and I will tell you now that the way that the cans are developed are different because of the chemicals they put in them and because they're not tin anymore. I mean, they don't weigh, they're not nearly as heavy. I've actually been to a museum where they actually had a tin can and they actually filled it with with water, and so you could sort of feel how heavy it was, and then they filled a regular can, the ones you would see on the shelves today at a good local grocery store, they filled that with water too, and you can see it was a lot less weight. So, but but regardless of where whether it is what whether it is a beverage contained in a bottle that's surviving a nuclear accident, whether it's a bottle of beer or cola, or you have food that has been placed into a can, it is amazing at how well we've been able to preserve this stuff for disasters, and it is something that is absolutely essential in keeping in your home pantry. And what I would suggest that you do is keep a basic par level. So just say, no matter what happens, I'm always gonna have ten different cans of food. And no matter what happens, if we get below that 10, I'm gonna make sure to refill it because in a disaster, you never know when you will need that can, whether it is today or a hundred years from now. This is Disaster Patrick, and remember prepare for a disaster, and you'll never experience one.