"No additional devices of this kind were built," Podvig says. Tsar Bomba ended up being a macabre curiosity of the nuclear age. "From the point of view of destructive power, it is more efficient to use several smaller weapons than one large one." He's a longtime nuclear weapons analyst who's worked with the United Nations and national security studies programs at Princeton and Stanford universities and operates the website. "Everybody understood that it is too big to be a practical weapon," Pavel Podvig explains in an email. This is what we did and the Soviets followed." Accuracy became an option and if you improve it by half you can cut the yield by a factor of eight. If ever used would clearly kill a lot more people. Theoretically, he says, "there is no limit on how big a hydrogen bomb can be. "looked into the big bomb option and decided no," Robert Standish Norris, a senior fellow for nuclear policy at the Federation of American Scientists, explains via email. scientists reassured the public that most of the debris from Tsar Bomba would stay high in the stratosphere and gradually lose its radioactivity by the time it fell to Earth. "The shock wave was really strong, however – it circumnavigated Earth three times."Įven 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.S. "As a result, fallout was very limited – much more limited than one could expect," Sokov said. Originally, they envisioned a 100-megaton weapon with a high level of radiation, but settled for one of slightly more than half that much explosive power, after the U.S.S.R.'s political leadership expressed worries about contamination from such a blast. "Hence, if you can deliver only one, two or three bombs, they better be very powerful," Sokov explains via email.īut the Soviet researchers pushed that idea to an extreme. The U.S., in contrast, had a variety of aircraft that could strike from bases conveniently close to Soviet territory. 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. In the frightening logic of all-out nuclear war, having a high-yield H-bomb did make some sense theoretically. 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.S. 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 1950s. Tsar Bomba's test was symbolic of the escalating tensions between the Soviets and the U.S., after a June 1961 summit in Vienna between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. Why Did the Soviets Want Such a Humongous Bomb? In Soviet towns 100 miles (160 kilometers) from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, and brick and stone structures suffered damage.Īfter being largely forgotten for many years, Tsar Bomba was back in the news in August 2020, 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: When the giant bomb finally detonated about 13,000 feet (4 kilometers) over its target, the blast was so powerful that it destroyed everything within a nearly 22-mile (35-kilometer) radius, and generated a mushroom cloud that towered nearly 200,000 feet (60 kilometers). On that day in 1961, it was released on a parachute in order to slow its descent and give the bomber and its crew a chance to escape. Tsar Bomba's yield is estimated to have been roughly 57 megatons, about 3,800 times the power of the 15 kiloton atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The device had the prosaic official name of izdeliye 602 ("item 602"), but it's gone down in history with the nickname of Tsar Bomba – the Russian way of calling it the emperor of bombs.
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