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From the book What If? of XKCD when talking about super strong winds:

The flying debris would pulverize anything that wasn't nuclear-hardened.

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What does nuclear-hardened mean? The closest result from Google for this term is Radiation hardening. But radiation hardening simply means making a device withstand-able in high radiation environment. The context doesn't mention anything about radiation, or radiation wind (if it even exists), just air wind.

So what does nuclear-hardened mean?

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    Your answer is in the comic itself. Depleted Uranium is high density and is being used to create armor plating. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
    – TsSkTo
    Oct 26, 2016 at 16:50
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    I believe nuclear-hardened means hardened to withstand an attack by a nuclear weapon - including not only the radiation, but also the explosion. Oct 26, 2016 at 17:00
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    Let's swap phasing in the quote and in your defintion: The flying debris would pulverize anything that wasn't radiation-hardened. But nuclear hardening simply means making a device withstand-able [sic] in [a] high nuclear [fallout] environment. Does that help?
    – cobaltduck
    Oct 26, 2016 at 17:00

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Nuclear hardened means able to withstand the nearby detonation of a nuclear device. I used to work* in such a building, part of the USAF SAGE program of the 1950s & 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment The walls & floors were about 2-3 ft of reinforced concrete, intended to withstand a nuclear detonation on the airfield about 1/4 mile away.

*Not when it was in active military use, but some decades later, when it had been converted to an academic research facility.

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