You might also be interested in the story of Lew Allen's Balls (which is much less prurient than the name might suggest). These were pumpkin-sized steel sphere

You might also be interested in the story of Lew Allen's Balls (which is much less prurient than the name might suggest). These were pumpkin-sized steel spheres, coated in a thin layer of graphite, that were suspended as close as 10 meters from one of the Teapot nuclear explosions (22 kT) in Nevada. The explosion vaporized about 1 mm of graphite but otherwise didn't damage the spheres much at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by1xpy8ob8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by1xpy8ob8E (starting around 5:50).