In 1953, it was still unclear how nuclear weapons would change the modern battlefield and pretty much every major army in the world was grappling with the question. The explosive power unleashed on the city of Hiroshima, the equivalent of 16,000 tons of TNT in a single bomb, was a turning point in history for sure, but how would it change tactics on the battlefield?

You find out, as this YouTube video by Plainly Difficult explains, by nuking a tank and seeing what happens.

The British Army dragged a then-top-of-the-line Centurion tank through the Australian outback to a very Austrailian-named nuclear test site called Emu Field. Then it detonated an atomic device the equivalent of 9,000 tons of TNT just five hundred yards away, as part of the Operation Totem series of nuclear tests in 1953.

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The result? The 51-ton tank was moved a scant five feet and was largely unscathed. The simulated crew, on the other hand, would not have survived.

And though the blast did minimal physical damage to the tank, the horrible legacy of the bomb blast persisted. After decontamination, which happened so late that many of the bomb-test support crew was exposed, the tank went back into service for the Vietnam War. Years later, it was found that the real, human crew assigned to it later suffered from abnormally high cancer rates. It's impossible to know for sure that the tank was at fault, but the truth remains that nukes are no joke, even if they can barely move a tank at 500 yards.

Source: Plainly Difficult

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