The Government Once Nuked a Bunch of File Cabinets

If you’ve ever seen the film Office Space, you’re familiar with the scene where a group of characters take out their frustrations on a printer with a baseball bat.

At a grander scale, imagine that scene, but in the director’s cut, the United States government drops a 20-kiloton nuclear weapon on office filing cabinets.

Believe It or Not!, that actually happened.

Operation Teapot

The project’s codename was ‘Operation Teapot,’ and it was designed to test nuclear impacts in a variety of different situations and on an array of different targets.

Consisting of 14 different detonations, Operation Teapot tested a nuclear bomb at low altitudes, underground, and yes, on a group of 22 file cabinets.

Where Do File Cabinets Come In?

Codenamed ‘Project 35.5,’ its objective was to determine the impact of a nuclear blast on record-keeping equipment, understanding that the survival of documents and vital records would be important in the aftermath of a nuclear event.

The filing cabinets were placed inside structures and exposed at the Nevada testing site, and they were filled with an assortment of print mediums, including telegrams, microfilm, and paper samples. The cabinets were placed at strategic distances from 500 to 1,470 feet away.

The nuclear device was detonated from a 500-foot tower, where it proceeded to decimate nearly each one of the 22 filing cabinets. Seven of the eight cabinets placed at the 500 to 1,050-foot ranges were entirely destroyed, with only small fragments of metal remnants littering the test site!

operation teapot tower — One of the 500 foot towers being used in the test series. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

14 of the 22 test subjects were unable to be recovered, and thermal test strips placed inside of the cabinets showed that the temperature reached 490 degrees Fahrenheit shortly after detonation.

The contents of the cabinets placed inside buildings or structures survived intact.

The Results?

The findings of Project 35.5 revealed that records are best kept indoors to ensure they make it through a nuclear blast, a conclusion that may or may not have needed the assistance of nuclear weaponry.