US Military Tested the Effects of a Nuclear Holocaust On Beer 215
pigrabbitbear writes "Is bottled beer nuclear bombproof? The United States government conducted a couple tests in the 1950s to find out—it exploded nuclear bombs with 'packaged commercial beverages' deposited at varying distances from the blast center to see if beer and soda would be safe to drink afterwards. The finding? Yep, surviving bottled and canned drinks can be consumed in the event of a nuclear holocaust, without major health risks."
Aha! so that's what Indiana Jones was doing... (Score:5, Funny)
in the refrigerator. Searching for beer!
Re:Aha! so that's what Indiana Jones was doing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Aha! so that's what Indiana Jones was doing... (Score:5, Funny)
in the refrigerator. Searching for beer!
After reading the script I would have been searching for a beer too.
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in the refrigerator. Searching for beer!
After reading the script I would have been searching for tequila too.
Fixed that for you.
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Raiders of the Lost Artesian
"Throw me the Budweiser, I throw you the whip!"
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More like "If you throw me a Budweiser, I will whip you"
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Amen!
I figured there was a reason for keeping all those Clydesdales around besides pulling wagons. ;-)
"Ahhh, Budweiser, the beer that has real Horsepower in it!"
Re:Aha! so that's what Indiana Jones was doing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen!
I figured there was a reason for keeping all those Clydesdales around besides pulling wagons. ;-)
"Ahhh, Budweiser, the beer that has real Horsepower in it!"
"[...] Although the human body maintains a mean power expenditure of some 100 watts, power excursions as high as 742 watts have been observed, chiefly drawn by the endocrine system and the smooth muscles of the stomach and esophagus, as the body's immunologic and adrenal responses take over to expel the deadly Budweiser from the patient's system. The bulk of retrograde Budweiser flow occurs via the mouth; however, the added cross-sectional area afforded by the nostrils is typically utilized, expediting removal of the vile fluid by several percentage points versus solely oral expulsions; the evolutionary advantage realized by this improvement are evident to those who've been attendant to the toll this foul poison may take on the human body and psyche."
—"Acute Budweiser Poisoning: Bio-kinetic Response in Humans," NEJM, 1934
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"Throw me the Budweiser, I throw you the whip!"
"Budweiser... Why'd it have to be Budweiser?"
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Indiana Jones, in the Refrigerator, with the beer.
Cludo will never be the same.
Research for Nerds. (Score:2, Offtopic)
This might be a record, tests from the 1950s !?
Fallout (Score:4, Funny)
Who would want normal beer, when you can drink Nuka-Cola. Keep the caps.
Well, works for me (Score:2)
I ordered some Twinkies from the US just to see (Score:5, Funny)
I ordered a box of Twinkies at an insane price from the US, just to finally taste this product of American culture so often mentioned in movies. It says on the box that they can only be kept for a short time, so I decided to taste this over a long period. 1 year and still going. Taste? Still the same. GODDAMN AWFUL! Next month I will try another one. I am thinking of turning myself in for unethical testing on a dumb animal.
Feeeewwwww (Score:2)
So that's how we make American beer! (Score:2)
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The Reinheitsgebot isn't necessarily a good thing to follow. Many great British, Belgian, and American craft beers do not meet the sometimes odd rules of the Reinheitsgebot.
The list of "11 Reasons why the Reinheitsgebot is bollocks" explains it pretty well: http://patto1ro.home.xs4all.nl/reinheit.htm [xs4all.nl]
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I've heard that conspiracy theory but it doesn't hold water. There was/is no rule that prevented wheat beer production or sale. They just couldn't call it beer.
That said; nobody in their right mind would drink beer with wheat, corn or rice in it, if they had a good alternative. Most beer with added flavors in America is wheat beer, which is so sour it is improved by most things. Which isn't really a positive about wheat beer IMHO. It puts it in a class with Corona (lime to cover the flavor).
At least it
A massive sigh of relief (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A massive sigh of relief (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A massive sigh of relief (Score:5, Funny)
On the plus side Guinness is dense enough to block even high-energy neutron radiation, so only the first row of bottles will be ruined. As an added bonus the irradiated beer can still be distilled into a potent scotch that will give you superhuman alcohol consumption abilities, not that anyone will notice.
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Re:A massive sigh of relief (Score:5, Informative)
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Ale barman and cellarman for 10 years.
More info needed (Score:2)
From the '50s, beer would have been in rugged steel cans. How about today's thin aluminum cans?
Rugged is Archaic (Score:5, Funny)
Who gives a shit? (Score:2)
Really, if I see a mushroom cloud and a 6-pack, the last thing on my mind will be "oh, I hope that's not irradiated." I'm getting WASTED!
Nice to know the important things are safe. (Score:2)
Power Vacuum (Score:4, Funny)
finally (Score:2)
valuable scientific research
Define "safe" (Score:2)
The article did not report how they determined that the drinks were safe or in what quantities.
Chemical/biological issues from one or two bottles is probably going to be minimal.
Radioactivity from drinking nothing but nuked beer for months could be problem.
Beer.... (Score:2)
The real question ... (Score:2)
Of course now we need to find out if it will be safe after the zombie apocalypse!
"This is perfectly safe"... (Score:2)
...proclaimed the professor as an arm sprouted out of his forehead...
By this logic, it would be perfectly safe to drink out of a spring post-holocaust (I'm thinking not; a tapwell, maybe, but not an open spring - hard radiation would likely not penetrate deep enough to contaminate a water table, but between it and fallout, surface sources would be rendered unusable).
There's contamination, and then there's... (Score:2)
An Australian beer called "Black Swan" would probably survive atomic bombardment as well as any other beer. On the other hand, its effects on the digestive system are such that anybody stuck in a fallout shelter with somebody who had been drinking it would willingly go outside to frolic in the radioactive ash and breathe less contaminated air.
Ha! (Score:2)
I'm sure somewhere in Iran a swivel eyed ayatollah is shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Well I guess there's no point now, we might as well shut down the reactor. Curse those decadent western peegs!".
Re:But what about Nuka Cola? (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad they didn't test Nuka Cola as well.
This is how you MAKE Nuka Cola.
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I have already started my bottle cap collection... when the big one hits, I'll be a billionaire.
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The Sunset Sarsparilla is for when you don't want a buzz from Nuka Cola.
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You can keep your Cola, I'll take Roentgen Rum - the clear bottle lets it double as a dim lantern if you get stuck in an abandoned vault someplace.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Funny)
Were you paying taxes in 1955?
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Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
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The United State's national debt was completely paid off in January 1835. It only lasted a year though.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_public_debt#Early_history
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But if George Washington hadn't spent $100 of the national treasury on fake teeth and cherry trees, the country would have been $100 further in the black in 1835. And when we went back in debt, our debts would have been $100 less, all the way up until today, not accounting for interest & inflation.
The point is, it's silly to complain about relatively small expenditures from a long time ago.
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Typically, being stuck with the bill from an earlier generation is reason to complain. But, if we have enough good left in us, we can pay off the bill so our children / successors do not.
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As long as we have a debt-based economy, the idea we can just "pay all our bills" is a fallacy.
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Most people can't pay off their entire mortgage on the first of the month.
Re:Waste of money (Score:4, Interesting)
Eg, in the USA, the Fed creates the money, and it is immediately loaned and begins earning interest. That interest doesn't have currency in the system to cover it, hence money has to be borrowed from the Fed to pay the interest owed to the Fed. Vicious cycle ensues, borrowing money to pay the interest on the borrowed money.
No way out except to default, or nationalise the Fed.
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So you are on wife number 4?
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You can at maximum pay back the capital. Inflation can reduce the value of what is owed, but not the numerical amount. The interest debt is unpayable within t
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Formula for computing the future value (FV) of an investment's present value (PV) accruing at a fixed interest rate (i) for n periods:
FV = PV*(1 + i)^n
Computing...
FV = 100 * (1 + 0.06)^177
FV = 3013964.63322
Assuming that you deposited it at a bank that gives you 6% annual interest, your $100 in 1835 would have grown to $3,013,964.63 by now.
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at which point you need to start complaining about the horrible debts that were racked up putting down the Whiskey Rebellion by Washington too.
Federal debt was completely eliminated in 1835.
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Well I am paying the interest and principle on money borrowed in 1955.
The money spent in 1955 has long since been paid off. So...no you're not.
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At least they didn't waste any on trying to educate you.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
From the summary: "The United States government conducted a couple tests in the 1950s to find out". Testing this was probably very relevant under the threat of the cold war to know what food and drink would be safe to consume.
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Yeah, but you need to consider that most lagers are just coloured heavy water.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
The cost of throwing a few cases of cheap beer a round and then testing them is practically infinitesimal to the cost of setting of a nuclear weapon. It's not as if they blew the thing up just to test the drinks.
We irradiate our food to ensure its safety. Radiation is not a threat to food... at least not once its been picked or killed. Radioactive material is, of course.
That's a whole 'nother level. The radiation food is exposed to is also almost nothing compared to the radiation released in a nuke. Plus, in a nuclear blast, you have all sorts of particles flying around that are radioactive, but not the same high frequency beams used in industrial purposes.
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You also need to consider that irradiated food has to be labeled as such and has generally been rejected by the consumer as unsafe. (Whereas, presumably, they'd have eaten food irradiated by far harder radiation, then smothered in radioactive particles of assorted deadly kinds, and regarded it as safe.) Most supermarket food is NOT irradiated, the market opted to go the GM route because people were more willing to buy something that produced its own toxic pesticides.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
How do you think we learned it is safe? Besides, I'm sure this wasn't a central reason for the testing, more like an add-on since they were setting off the nukes anyway.
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Radiation is not a threat to food... at least not once its been picked or killed. Radioactive material is, of course.
Perfect example of historian's fallacy [wikipedia.org].
Unless you know something about time travel that I don't, the reason we know it's safe now is because in the 50s they did not know, and did the tests to find out.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Interesting)
Radiation is not a threat to food... at least not once its been picked or killed. Radioactive material is, of course.
Perfect example of historian's fallacy.
Unless you know something about time travel that I don't, the reason we know it's safe now is because in the 50s they did not know, and did the tests to find out.
But we don't know that, in spite of the testing done in the 1950s. By 'we', I include all the paranoid crybabies that get their panties in a bunch every time the FDA considers allowing irradiation as a food preservation method.
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These people are merely a vocal minority.
But vocal enough to affect FDA (or EU) decision making.
The majority have accepted radiation of food,
But you don't see the FDA mandating "ionizing radiation" warning labels on microwave ovens or cast iron skillets.
We need an FDA-mandated "crazy" label that we can tattoo on these peoples' foreheads.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
The world (especially voters and politicians) believe in nutjob armageddon/rapture bullshit and are hell-bent on making sure it happens as soon as possible. I, for one, would love to know that beer will be safe to drink if I happen to be fortunate enough to still be alive after all the crazies have self-fulfilled their insane prophecies.
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The world (especially voters and politicians) believe in nutjob armageddon/rapture bullshit and are hell-bent on making sure it happens as soon as possible
Let me help you out there -
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, AKA the Soviet Union, governed by the religion suppressing [wikipedia.org] atheistic Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" operated according to the "scientific principles" of Marxist-Leninism, built an actual Doomsday weapon, that is still active: Soviet Doomsday Device Still Armed and Ready [wired.com] and Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine [wired.com].. Apparently secular socialist progressive totalitarians are just as crazy
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Lucky you.
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Don't you ever confuse governments with the mentally ill. The more I compare modern politicians with the script for "Quatermas II", the more concerned I become. Look for strange purple blotches around the face or neck. That can be a warning sign of aliens.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Funny)
First, beer surviving the holocaust is not something I see as a useful way to spend my tax dollars.
I have to disagree with you. It was a rather important first step to decide if it's even worthwhile trying to survive the holocaust.
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I dunno, you can brew beer. And after the holocaust, I'd consider beer brewed the Old Egyptian way (it actually contains high levels of antibiotics) rather than by "modern" methods to be rather more useful for containing outbreaks of disease. That would make starting over on the beer production a more practical approach.
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In the immediate aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, surviving still-sealed drinks would likely be the only available clean water not heavily contaminated with radioactivity. This would in fact be quite important before any efforts to cleanse contaminated water could get underway, which would take longer than one can survive without water intake to establish on any significant scale. In any case, I really doubt the "spending" on this went beyond some guy laying out drinks in a line away from another test and
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
Glass and water, yes, but bottle tops are thin steel, and cans are aluminum. Starting from the most common isotope of Iron (which is about 90% of all the iron in the normal environment), one extra neutron captured gives an isotope with a half-life of roughly a couple of days. For aluminum, having the most stable isotope capture either 1 or 2 neutrons gives it a half-life of respectively 2 or 6 minutes. Military exposure recommendations are to assume aluminum in fallouts will be back to close to background rates in less than three days. That's a lot of half-lives at 6 min each, so Al will initially be a major source of the total radiation dose, but it's contribution will fall off much faster than the fallout overall becomes non-radioactive. You can take the proportionate decay rates and conclude that Iron won't contribute 1/1000th of the dose in the same quantities, but won't get back to near background level dose for thousands of times as long. So, for the first 37.8 hours, you should drink from bottles, and after that, switch to cans. *
* This is not a real recommendation. Real fallout will not just include neutron activated metals found naturally in whatever got nuked, but bomb material daughter products, and some of these may be very exotic isotopes, so real fallout should (but won't) come with a YMMV warning. If you are in a real fallout zone, knowing whether the soil of the target area was Al dominant minerals or not will probably not be of any use to you.
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By the mid-1950s, it was becoming common knowledge that smokers had a far higher chance of developing lung cancer. Within the scientific community, that had been known for a couple of decades. The tobacco companies fought it, of course, playing up the calming effects of smoking, but even their own researchers were starting to confirm the health hazards by then.
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First, beer surviving the holocaust is not something I see as a useful way to spend my tax dollars.
Speak for yourself, toots!
I demand a new round of testing for whiskey, desserts and snacks! Having a post apocalypse campfire interrupted by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would be a total bummer!
And hookers! Together we can construct bomb proof, radiation proof, 200 proof hookers!
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Preventing the holocaust is, naturally a top priority, but don't you think a plan B might be in order? Things like determining what can and cannot be consumed afterwards for survival for example.
Second... duh? We irradiate our food to ensure its safety. Radiation is not a threat to food... at least not once its been picked or killed.
And we know all about that because....(drum roll please) ...... the military researched it in the 1950's by irradiating foods and seeing what happened!
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Not all radiation is created equal - anything close to a nuclear blast will be subjected to high levels of both ionizing and neutron radiation, think sticking it within the shielding of a nuclear reactor for several days or weeks. Ionizing radiation is probably not directly a problem - just wait for the ionization to neutralize, but it could conceivably initiate chemical reactions that would make previously harmless food toxic - one of those things that's good to test. Neutron radiation on the other hand
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Beer = sealed unit that is covered to keep radioactive dust out. Water would have been exposed and open to radioactive dust. Radioactive dust is the biggest concern outside the immediate blast zone. I sincerely doubted the exploded a nuke just to test it's effect on beer. Probably a case of next nuke, throw a few cases downwind to see how they do.
The cost would be trivial and the knowledge would have been practical. Living in fear of a nuclear attack was quite real in those days. Remember this was back in t
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They didn't set off the bomb test just to see if beer would be affected by it. They just used the opportunity of the test. A six-pack of beer was less than a dollar back then so it didn't cost much. I imagine they tested a lot more things than beer to see how radiation affected it.
Re:Tax Dollars (Score:2)
Someone's been power-modding this entire super-thread down. 3/4 of the registered guys are at 0.
Including my comment that the work was from the 1950's hence it's dubious that you were paying taxes then. Your parents were, to be sure.
But still, this whole thread has been un-naturally down-modded.
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They probably found that out with those experiments. SIXTY YEARS AGO!
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Once exposed to the radiation the American piss lagers turned into very complex high abv Belgium quads. And the pretzels became self aware and super-intelligent and are now secretly running the federal reserve.
Boy, are you asking a lot from radiation! Although, it does explain the M&M ads lately...
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an organization that has as main purpose to kill people
Your initial premise has yet to be satisfied.
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It's an organization that has as its main purpose defending the nation. Back then, there was a lot of concern about nuclear holocaust and most people were certain that it was just a matter of time until one side or the other lit the fuse. Knowing what would be usable afterward and what would be dangerous was critical knowledge if society was to rebuild itself.
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If you're going for Devil's Advocate, you should understand that it means taking a position you don't necessarily agree with. I'm pretty sure you meant something else, so keep looking.
And the better way to be the whatever it was you hoped to be, is the normal nerdly way. We don't even have a published scientific report, and it's hardly peer reviewed. At best we have a "finding" which has yet to be validated and verified. It is not proof, nor does it pretend to be. As with most of the science that hits
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If you're going for Devil's Advocate, you should understand that it means taking a position you don't necessarily agree with.
No, Devil's Advocate on Slashdot is not just taking a position you don't normally believe in (lying), but deliberately taking the most absurd counterpoint to not only argue against something but do so in a manner that makes both people look dumber for trying. "The War Department, paid to kill people, suggests food near a nuclear blast is safe." So should we take that to mean that it's safe, or that the War Department wants us to try and die?
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Since the beers were made in 2077, and you're in the Mojave in 2281, your biggest problem is going to be the born-on date.
And in the Mojave Wasteland, when they talk about skunky beer, they mean it has giant, two-headed, cybernetically enhanced, armor plated skunks... with lasers.
Re:Premature (Score:5, Funny)
Twinkies, which last on the order of geological time, have these few main threats against their long term shelf life: 1. subduction under an adjacent tectonic plate 2. expansion of sun into red dwarf, though as the sun becomes less dense the earth and unconsumed twinkies may survive by increasing orbital axis 3. collision of earth with another major major astronomical body, eastimated to be on the order of every five billion years for event sufficient to destroy most or all twinkies 4. proton decay and/or quantum tunneling, 10^100 years or more
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Twinkies, which last on the order of geological time, have these few main threats against their long term shelf life: 1. subduction under an adjacent tectonic plate 2. expansion of sun into red dwarf, though as the sun becomes less dense the earth and unconsumed twinkies may survive by increasing orbital axis 3. collision of earth with another major major astronomical body, eastimated to be on the order of every five billion years for event sufficient to destroy most or all twinkies 4. proton decay and/or quantum tunneling, 10^100 years or more
I notice that being digested isn't on the list...
Re:Premature (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Twinkies (Score:2)
Ssh, you're threatening 15 years worth of urban legends with facts. Obviously the urban legends generate more ad revenue. I leave the conclusions to you. (Satire)
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Sorry you couldn't find any beer.
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I'm more interested in knowing what would be *unsafe* to drink / eat. Water? Milk? Juice? Juice boxes? Wine? Macaroni and cheese?
A can of Spam turned into a giant monster that ravaged Tokyo for a few days.