Tsar Bomba

• On 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba nuclear bomb over the Novaya Zemlya islands in Arctic Russia. To this day, this is the largest nuclear weapon detonated.
• The 27-tonne Soviet Tsar Bomba (king of bombs) was the most powerful weapon constructed.
• Officially named AN602 hydrogen bomb, it was originally intended to have a yield of 100 megatons, but this would have posed problems with the radioactive fallout. Later, the Tsar Bomba was reduced to have a yield of only 50 megatons of TNT.
• In an atmospheric test in 1961 it had a yield of 50 megatons - 3,300 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb and 1,400 times as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs combined.
• The bomb served no military purposes. It would be too heavy to carry and there was no plane able to do intercontinental flights with such a load. 

Tsar Bomba Test Location

• The Tsar Bomba was dropped the at 11:32 AM Moscow time, from a height of 10.5 km over Mityushikha Bay in Novaya Zemlya. The bomb detonated at a height of 4 km. The descent from the height it was dropped from until the place of the detonation at 4,000 meters above ground took 188 seconds, just enough time for the pilot to fly to a safe distance. 
• Just one second after the detonation, the fireball was already 4 miles wide, and the light could be seen at distances of over 2,000 kilometers. The mushroom raised to a height of about 64 km, over 7 times the height of Mount Everest.
• After the explosion, the surface of the island was leveled, and the rocks melted. Some reports indicate that windows were broken in northern Finland and Norway too. Complete destruction was observed over 40 km radius and severe destruction over 60 km radius.
• A 100 Mt weapon can level urban areas in a zone 60 km wide, cause heavy damage in a zone 100 km across, cause 3rd degree burns in a region 170 km across and eye damage to 220 km. Such a weapon can only be used as a means of destroying an entire urban region including suburbs and even neighboring cities. With its dense settlement, use of such a weapon in Europe is equivalent to an attack on a major portion of an entire nation and its population. 
• The energy released on the earth's surface by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was estimated at 26 megatons of TNT is half of that of Tsar Bomba (50 megatons of TNT).
• The weight of this 50 Mt Tsar Bomba was 27 tonnes and was nearly equal to the TU-95's maximum payload, and two and a half times its normal weapon load.
• The Tsar Bomba was flown to its test site by a specially modified TU-95V release plane, flown by Major Andrei Durnovtsev. Taking off from an airfield in the Kola Peninsula, the release plane was accompanied by a TU-16 observer plane that took air samples and filmed the test. Both aircraft were painted with a special reflective white paint to limit heat damage. Despite this effort, Durnovtsev and his crew were assigned only a 50% chance of surviving the test.
• It was decided that a full 100 Mt detonation would create too great a risk of nuclear fallout, as well as a near certainty that the release plane (and crew) would be destroyed before it could escape the blast radius.
• The Tsar Bomba was the culmination of a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapons designed by the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1950s.
• The creation of the Tsar Bomba was the result of political calculation by the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. A de facto moratorium had existed between the U.S., USSR and UK and two years of discussion had been conducted regarding formal limitations on nuclear testing. The Cold War continued at high pitch and the decision to break the moratorium with a "testing spectacular" that coincided with the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a move cast in the same mold.
• Khrushchev in the meeting of Soviet weapons scientists declared that tests would resume in the fall to 'show the imperialists what we could do', a decision that came as a surprise to the scientists present. Khrushchev specifically cited as the primary motivation a political rather than a technical justification. His view was that the international situation was deteriorating.
• It was also referred to as Nikita Khrushchev's promise to show the United States a "Kuz'kina Mat'"(an idiom roughly translating to "We'll show you!") at the 1960 United Nations General Assembly. 

World's Most Powerful Neclear Bomb - Tsar Bomba