The Most Powerful Bomb Ever Constructed

Tsar Bomba was the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Developed by the Soviet Union, this hydrogen bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT; however that was reduced by half in order to limit the amount of nuclear fallout that would result.

It detonated at 11:32 on October 30, 1961 over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range, north of the Arctic Circle on Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea.

Even at half strength, the Tsar was a hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons. This is equivalent to TEN times the amount of ALL the explosives used in World War II combined, including the Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively.


The explosion:

The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen and felt almost 1,000 km (621 miles) from ground zero. The heat from the explosion could have caused third degree burns 100 km (62 miles) away from ground zero.

The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 km (40 miles) high (nearly seven times higher than Mount Everest) and 40 km (25 miles) wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, even breaking windows there. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth. Its Richter magnitude was about 5 to 5.25.



The Tsar Bomba (codenamed Ivan) was so powerful that it was completely impractical: much of the explosion's energy radiated upwards into space, and that which didn't was so excessive that using the device on any populated targets world would have resulted in adverse effects on Russian interests. It served as nothing more than a show of force.

Only one (real) unit was built, and a real sized mock bomb is stored in the Russian Nuclear Weapons Museum in Sarov.

Footage from the lauch:

Via corvos de malta, wikipedia

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