The fireball pulsed upwards from the force of its own shockwave. The flash could be seen from 1,km miles away. It must have been, from a very far distance perhaps, an awe-inspiring sight. On Novaya Zemlya, the effects were catastrophic.
In the village of Severny, some 55km 34 miles from Ground Zero, all houses were completely destroyed this is the equivalent to Gatwick airport being destroyed by a bomb that had fallen on Central London. In Soviet districts hundreds of miles from the blast zone, damage of all kinds — houses collapsing, roofs falling in, damage to doors, windows shattering — were reported.
Radio communications were disrupted for more than an hour. One Soviet cameraman who witnessed the detonation said:. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent.
At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.
Tsar Bomba unleashed almost unbelievable energy — now widely agreed to be in the order of 57 megatons, or 57 million tons of TNT. That is more than 1, times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two. Such a blast could not be kept secret.
The US had a spyplane only tens of kilometres from the blast. It carried a special optical device called a bhangmeter useful for calculating the yield of far-off nuclear explosions. The only silver lining in this mushroom cloud was that because the fireball had not made contact with the Earth, there was a surprisingly low amount of radiation.
It could have been very different. But for a change in its design to rein in some of the power it could unleash, Tsar Bomba was supposed to have been twice as powerful. One of the architects of this formidable device was a Soviet physicist called Andrei Sakharov — a man who would later become world famous for his attempts to rid the world of the very weapons he had helped create. Sakharov began work on a layered fission-fusion-fission device, a bomb that would create further energy from the nuclear processes in its core.
When the giant bomb finally detonated about 13, feet 4 kilometers over its target, the blast was so powerful that it destroyed everything within a nearly mile kilometer radius, and generated a mushroom cloud that towered nearly , feet 60 kilometers.
In Soviet towns miles kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed , and brick and stone structures suffered damage. After being largely forgotten for many years, Tsar Bomba was back in the news in August , when Russian state nuclear power company Rosatom posted on YouTube a vintage film that showed an aerial view of the explosion and the towering cloud it created:.
One of the cameramen who recorded the event described the bomb as creating "a powerful white flash over the horizon and after a long period of time he heard a remote, indistinct and heavy blow, as if the Earth has been killed. Tsar Bomba's test was symbolic of the escalating tensions between the Soviets and the U. President John F.
Kennedy went badly. Khrushchev apparently decided to take out his frustrations by showing off Soviet military prowess, including ending the informal moratorium on nuclear testing that both countries had maintained since the late s. The resumption of testing gave Soviet weapons researchers a chance to try out an idea they had for building a giant H-bomb, one that was far bigger than the most powerful weapon in the U. In the frightening logic of all-out nuclear war, having a high-yield H-bomb did make some sense theoretically.
At the time, missiles capable of striking at distant countries were still in their infancy, and the Soviet Union didn't have many strategic bombers, according to Nikolai Sokov , a Vienna-based senior fellow affiliated with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California.
The U. But the Soviet researchers pushed that idea to an extreme. Originally, they envisioned a megaton weapon with a high level of radiation, but settled for one of slightly more than half that much explosive power, after the U. Even so, Japanese authorities found the highest level of radiation in rainwater that they'd ever detected, and an "invisible cloud of radioactive ash" that drifted eastward across the Pacific, and then crossed Canada and the Great Lakes region of the U.
But U. Tsar Bomba made headlines in the U. As aviation journalist Tom Demerly has written, the U. Due to high winds during the test, radioactive substances were also found as far away as Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Southwestern United States for several weeks following the blast. Unanticipated fallout and radiation created an international incident in the weeks that followed, as thousands of individuals were affected by various levels of radiation sickness including nausea, diarrhea, hair loss, skin lesions, and vomiting.
Although the TX was not the largest nuclear bomb designed by the American military, it remains the largest nuclear test ever carried out by the United States.
The B41 Nuclear Bomb, also known as the Mk, was a three-stage thermonuclear weapon designed by the United States during the early s. As the most powerful bomb ever constructed by the Americans, the maximum yield of the device was estimated to generate nearly 25 Megatons of destructive force upon detonation.
Employing deuterium-tritium as its primary, along with lithium-6 enriched deuteride for its fuel source, the B41 utilized nuclear fusion to create its massive yield. The B41 measured over feet long 3. Nearly of these massive bombs were developed between and , before finally being retired in July following its replacement by the B Despite being smaller in yield than the most powerful bomb on our list, researchers argue that the B was the most efficient thermonuclear weapon ever designed in history, maintaining the highest yield-to-weight ratio of any weapon created.
Tsar Bomba. Notice the size of the mushroom cloud as it rises into the Earth's atmosphere. Delivered by a modified TuV Soviet bomber, the bomb weighed approximately 27 metric tons 59, pounds and was twenty-six feet long by 7 feet wide. Due to its tremendous size and destructive power 50 Megatons , a special parachute was constructed to slow the descent of the bomb to earth, giving the bomber crew time to fly approximately twenty-eight miles away before the Tsar Bomba detonated.
Unbeknownst to the crew, however, Soviet scientists gave the pilots only a percent chance of actually surviving the blast once detonation occurred.
At PM, the Tsar Bomba was dropped from an altitude of 34, feet and detonated approximately 4, meters aboveground. The nuclear blast possibly reaching a yield of Although the Tuv bomber crew survived the blast, their aircraft was caught by the shockwave seventy-one miles away, nearly downing the plane.
An experimental American aircraft, known as the KCR was also in the area during the test and was scorched by the blast, nearly killing the pilot on board.
Heat from the explosion was also capable of causing third-degree burns as far as sixty-two miles away kilometers. Original yields for the Tsar Bomba were calculated to be Megatons. Nevertheless, the Tsar Bomba remains the single most deadly and powerful nuclear device ever detonated on Earth. Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear Weapons, n. Answer: As of , approximately 2, nuclear devices have been dropped or fired by the various world governments. These tests include underwater, atmospheric, traditional, and underground detonations.
To date, the United States and former Soviet Union have conducted the most nuclear bomb tests with 1, and , respectively. If the tsar bomba were to be utilised at its maximum capacity it could potentially cause a five year long winter and if detonated in especially windy areas cause a devastating wave of cancer ARS and genetic mutations and possibly in the right conditions end around half of humanity.
The Tsar Bomba was estimated to be capable of achieving megatons but was not tested with this capability due to the insane risks with that quantity of fallout. And all the while I thought the B41 nuclear bomb was the most powerful in history! And I hope nothing exists as more powerful than the Tsar. I agree, Liz! Makes me wonder what other types of nuclear weapons may exist that we know nothing about haha. These are frightening weapons.
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