Initially, it was planned to create a bomb weighing 40 tons. But the designers of the Tu-95 (which was supposed to deliver the bomb to the crash site) immediately rejected this idea. An aircraft with such a load simply could not fly to the landfill. The specified mass of the "superbomb" has been reduced.
Nonetheless, large dimensions and the huge power of the bomb (originally planned to be eight meters long, two meters in diameter with a mass of 26 tons) required significant modifications to the Tu-95. The result was, in fact, a new, and not just a modified version of the old aircraft, which received the designation Tu-95-202 (Tu-95V). The Tu-95-202 aircraft was equipped with two additional control panels: one - to control the automation of the "product", the other - to control its heating system. The problem of suspension of an aerial bomb turned out to be very difficult, since, due to its dimensions, it did not fit in the bomb bay of the aircraft. For its suspension, a special device was designed to ensure the rise of the "product" to the fuselage and fix it on three synchronously controlled locks.
All electrical connectors were replaced on the plane, the wings and fuselage were covered with reflective paint.
To ensure the safety of the carrier aircraft, Moscow designers of airborne equipment developed a special system of six parachutes (the area of the largest was 1.6 thousand square meters). They were ejected from the tail of the bomb body one by one and slowed down the bomb's descent, so that the aircraft had time to move to a safe distance by the time of the explosion.
By 1959, the superbomb carrier had been created, but due to some warming of relations between the USSR and the USA, things did not come to practical tests. Tu-95-202 was first used as a training aircraft at the airfield in the city of Engels, and then was decommissioned as unnecessary.
However, in 1961, with the beginning of a new round " cold war", the tests of the "superbomb" again became relevant. After the adoption of the decree of the Government of the USSR on the resumption of tests nuclear charge in July 1961, emergency work began at KB-11 (now the Russian Federal Nuclear Center - All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics, RFNC-VNIIEF), which in 1960 was entrusted with the further development of the superbomb, where it was given the designation "product 602" . In the design of the superbomb itself and its charge, big number major innovations. Initially, the charge power was 100 megatons of TNT. At the initiative of Andrei Sakharov, the charge power was halved.
The carrier aircraft from the decommissioned ones was returned to service. All connectors in the reset electric system were urgently replaced on it, the doors of the cargo compartment were removed, because. real bomb in terms of dimensions and weight, it turned out to be slightly larger than the model (the length of the bomb is 8.5 meters, its weight is 24 tons, the parachute system is 800 kilograms).
Particular attention was paid to the special training of the carrier aircraft crew. No one could give the pilots a guarantee of a safe return after the bomb was dropped. Experts feared that after the explosion, an uncontrollable thermonuclear reaction in the atmosphere.
Nikita Khrushchev announced the upcoming bomb tests in his report on October 17, 1961 at the XXII Congress of the CPSU. The State Commission supervised the tests.
October 30, 1961 Tu-95V with a bomb on board, taking off from the Olenya airfield in Murmansk region, headed for a training ground located on the archipelago New Earth in the Northern Arctic Ocean. The Tu-16 laboratory aircraft took off next to record the phenomena of the explosion and flew as a wingman behind the carrier aircraft. The entire course of the flight and the explosion itself were filmed from the Tu-95V, from the accompanying Tu-16 and from various points on the ground.
At 11:33, at the command of a barometric sensor, a bomb dropped from 10,500 meters exploded at an altitude of 4,000 meters. The fireball during the explosion exceeded the radius of four kilometers, it was prevented from reaching the surface of the earth by a powerful reflected shock wave, throwing a fireball off the ground.
The huge cloud formed as a result of the explosion reached a height of 67 kilometers, and the diameter of the dome of hot products was 20 kilometers.
The explosion was so strong that the seismic wave in earth's crust, generated by the shock wave, went around the Earth three times. The flash was visible at a distance of more than 1000 kilometers. In an abandoned village, located at a distance of 400 kilometers from the epicenter, trees were uprooted, windows were shattered and the roofs of houses were demolished.
The carrier aircraft, which by that time was at a distance of 45 kilometers from the drop point, was thrown by a shock wave to a height of 8000 meters, and for some time after the explosion the Tu-95V was uncontrollable. The crew received some dose of radiation. Due to ionization, communication with the Tu-95V and Tu-16 was lost for 40 minutes. What happened to the planes and crews, all this time no one knew. After some time, both aircraft returned to base, tan marks were visible on the fuselage of the Tu-95V.
Unlike the American test hydrogen bomb"Castro Bravo", the explosion of the "Tsar Bomba" on Novaya Zemlya turned out to be relatively "clean". The test participants arrived at the point over which the thermonuclear explosion occurred, already two hours later; the level of radiation in that place great danger did not imagine. This was affected design features Soviet bomb, as well as the fact that the explosion occurred at a sufficiently large distance from the surface.
According to the results of aircraft and ground measurements, the energy release of the explosion was estimated at 50 megatons of TNT equivalent, which coincided with the expected value according to the calculations.
A test on October 30, 1961 showed that developments in the field nuclear weapons can quickly cross the critical limit. The main goal that was set and achieved by this test was to demonstrate the possibility of creating the USSR with unlimited power thermonuclear charges. This event played a key role in establishing nuclear parity in the world and the prevention of the use of atomic weapons.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
On October 30, 1961, the test of the most powerful bomb in world history was carried out at the test site of the island of Novaya Zemlya. The 58 megaton thermonuclear bomb, dubbed the Tsar Bomba, was developed by a group of scientists that included such luminaries as A.D. Sakharov, V.B. Adamsky, Yu.A. Trutnev and others. SmartNews will tell about five trials of the USSR that made the whole world shudder.
On October 30, 1961, a thermonuclear aviation bomb was tested, developed by a group of nuclear physicists led by I.V. Kurchatov. In the world, AN602 is better known as "Kuzkin's mother" and "Tsar bomb". The first nickname appeared because of Khrushchev's statement: "We will show America Kuzkin's mother." But the "Tsar Bomba" AN602 was called because it became the most powerful and destructive weapon throughout the history of mankind. So, during the tests, the carrier aircraft, which managed to fly off from the explosion site by almost 40 kilometers, landed burnt and with melted parts. Is it worth talking about what happened within a radius of 20 kilometers from the explosion? The most important point in the test of AN602 was the demonstration that the USSR now owns unlimited powerful weapon mass destruction. In TNT equivalent, the power of the Kuzkina Mother was four times more powerful than any US weapon.
On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet atomic bomb RDS-1 was successfully tested. The bomb got its name after a government decree, in which the bomb was recorded as a "special jet engine." The people called the bomb " jet engine Stalin." The power of this weapon was 22 kilotons. During the test, the tower, almost 40 meters high, on which the bomb was installed, was not only wiped off the face of the earth - in its place a funnel of one and a half meters deep formed. The explosion killed a fifth of the experimental animals and 10 vehicles located at a distance of a kilometer from the epicenter of events. Log houses within a radius of 5 km were completely destroyed. In the early fifties, five such bombs were made, which made up the entire nuclear arsenal countries for that period.
On August 12, 1953, the first Soviet hydrogen bomb was tested at the Semipalatinsk test site, which was developed by a group of scientists led by A.D. Sakharov and Yu.B. Khariton. They managed to get ahead of the whole world and create the first weapon of huge destructive power, which would be mobile and raised by a bomber. For comparison, the United States at that time had the best thermonuclear device the size of a three-story building. In addition, our scientists were the first to use "dry" fusion fuel, which was a huge breakthrough in technology. The test result of the RDS-6s exceeded the expectations of even its creators. The recorded power of the explosion was 400 kilotons. Within a radius of 4 km, all brick buildings collapsed. And the heaviest railway bridge, weighing several hundred tons, was thrown back from its original point by 200 m.
The T-5 torpedo test is the first Soviet underwater nuclear test. When the Soviet Union got its own nuclear weapons, scientists took up the problem of anti-nuclear protection of ships and the need to conduct a nuclear test in maritime conditions. The place of testing was the Black Bay. One of the reasons for this choice was that water exchange with Barents Sea in that area is extremely weak, and this could create some kind of obstacle for the release of radiation into the sea. On the appointed day, due to fog, the test of the torpedo had to be postponed. The charge was blown up the next day - September 21, 1955. The explosion occurred at a depth of approximately 57 m. Its TNT equivalent was 3.5 kilotons. According to the results of the experiment, scientists came to the conclusion that ships become most vulnerable if they are close to each other. If the ships are on maximum distance from each other, then only one ship can be shot down with one torpedo. The data obtained as a result of the test were taken into account in the subsequent construction of the ships.
First two-stage thermonuclear bomb The Soviet Union, although it had an unprecedented power of more than 1 Mt until that moment, during the tests caused a lot of problems. One of the troubles that happened with the RDS-37 was an emergency situation at the Semipalatinsk test site. When the plane with the bomb had already taken off, the weather deteriorated. It took the command two hours to make a firm decision to land the plane with the bomb back on the ground. It was decided to conduct a second test in a day, on November 22, 1955. The second attempt was more successful, but entailed a number of unplanned casualties. So, 36 km from the explosion, six soldiers were covered with earth, one of whom died. Due to the collapse of the ceiling in one local village, a girl died. Dozens of people were injured by broken glass. And various injuries and injuries of people were recorded in almost 60 settlements located within a radius of 200 km from the explosion.
On October 30, 1961, the most powerful bomb in the world was tested - the thermonuclear Tsar Bomba, later called Kuzkina's Mother, was dropped on the Dry Nose test site. Today we remember this and other explosions of enormous destructive power.
Mankind spends huge amounts of money and gigantic efforts to create weapons that are most effective in destroying their own kind. And, as science and history show, it succeeds in this. About what will happen to our planet if all of a sudden on Earth erupts nuclear war, many films have been shot and more than a dozen books have been written. But the dryest description of the conducted tests of weapons of mass destruction, reports formulated in a stingy clerical military language, remains the most terrible.
A projectile of incredible power was developed under the guidance of Kurchatov himself. As a result of seven years of work, the most powerful explosive device in the history of mankind was created. According to various sources, the bomb had from 57 to 58.6 megatons of TNT equivalent. For comparison, the explosion of the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT. How many troubles she has done, many know.
"Tsar Bomba" served as a demonstration of the power of the USSR to the Western community
The explosion resulted in a fireball with a radius of about 4.6 kilometers. The light radiation was so powerful that it could cause third-degree burns at a distance of about 100 kilometers from the explosion site. The seismic wave that arose as a result of the tests circled three times Earth. The nuclear mushroom rose to a height of 67 kilometers, and the diameter of its "cap" was 95 kilometers.
This is not the sun. This is a flash from the explosion of the "Tsar Bomba"
Tests of the "Mother of all bombs"
Until 2007, the American high-explosive aerial bomb, affectionately known as Mother Of All Bombs by the US military, was considered the largest non-nuclear bomb in the world. The projectile is over 9 meters long and weighs 9.5 tons. And most of this weight falls on the explosive. The force of the explosion is 11 tons of TNT. That is, two "Moms" are enough to smash the average metropolis into dust. However, the fact that so far bombs of this type have not been used in the course of hostilities is encouraging. But one of the "Moms" was sent to Iraq just in case. Apparently, counting on the fact that peacekeepers cannot do without weighty arguments.
"Mother of all bombs" was the most powerful non-nuclear weapon until "Dad of all bombs" appeared
According to the official description of the ammunition, "the power of the MOAB explosion is enough to destroy tanks and people on the surface within a few hundred meters and demoralize the troops in the vicinity who survived the explosion."
Explosion at the tests of the "Dad of all bombs"
This is our answer to the Americans - the development of an aviation vacuum bomb increased power, unofficially dubbed "The Pope of All Bombs". The ammunition was created in 2007 and now it is this bomb that is considered the most powerful non-nuclear projectile in the world.
Bomb test reports say that the area of destruction of the "Papa" is so large that it allows to reduce the cost of production of ammunition by reducing the requirements for accuracy. Indeed, why a targeted hit if it blows everything around within a radius of 200 meters. And even at a distance of more than two kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion, a person will be knocked down by a shock wave. After all, the power of the "Papa" is four times greater than the "Mom" - the power of the explosion of a vacuum bomb is 44 tons of TNT. As a separate achievement, the testers argue that the projectile is environmentally friendly. "The test results of the created aviation ammunition showed that in terms of its effectiveness and capabilities it is commensurate with a nuclear weapon, at the same time, I want to emphasize this in particular, the effect of this weapon does not pollute at all environment compared to a nuclear weapon,” the report says. Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Alexander Rukshin.
"Daddy of all bombs" is about four times more powerful than "Mom"
"Kid" and "Fat Man": Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The names of these two Japanese cities have long been synonymous with a massive disaster. The US military actually tested atomic bombs on humans, dropping shells on Hiroshima on August 6, and on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Most of the victims of the explosions were not military at all, but civilians. Children, women, old people - their bodies instantly turned into coal. There were only silhouettes on the walls - this is how light radiation acted. Birds flying nearby burned up in the air.
"Mushrooms" nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Until now, the number of victims has not been accurately determined: many died not immediately, but later, as a result of developed radiation sickness. "Kid" with an approximate capacity of 13 to 18 kilotons of TNT, dropped on Hiroshima, killed from 90 to 166 thousand people. In Nagasaki, "Fat Man" with a capacity of 21 kilotons of TNT cut off the lives of 60 to 90 thousand people.
"Fat Man" and "Baby" are exhibited in the museum - as a reminder of destructive power nuclear weapons
This was the first and so far the only case when the force of a nuclear weapon was used in the course of hostilities.
The fall of the Tunguska meteorite: the most powerful miraculous explosion
The Podkamennaya Tunguska River was of no interest to anyone until June 17, 1908. On this day, at about seven o'clock in the morning, a huge fireball swept over the territory of the Yenisei basin and exploded over the taiga near Tunguska. Now everyone knows about this river, and versions of what exploded over the taiga have since been published for every taste: from the invasion of aliens to the manifestation of the power of angry gods. However, the main and generally accepted cause of the explosion is still the fall of a meteorite.
The explosion was so powerful that trees were knocked down over an area of more than two thousand square kilometers. Windows were shattered in houses located hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. A few more days after the explosion in the territory from the Atlantic to central Siberia people saw the sky and clouds glow.
Scientists have calculated the approximate power of the explosion - from 40 to 50 megatons of TNT. That is, comparable to the power of the Tsar Bomba, the most destructive man-made bomb. It remains only to be glad that Tunguska meteorite fell in a remote taiga, far from villages and villages.
The destructive power of which, in the event of an explosion, cannot be stopped by anyone. What is the most powerful bomb in the world? To answer this question, you need to understand the features of certain bombs.
What is a bomb?
Nuclear power plants operate on the principle of releasing and shackling nuclear energy. This process must be controlled. The released energy is converted into electricity. An atomic bomb sets off a chain reaction that is completely uncontrollable, and great amount released energy causes monstrous destruction. Uranium and plutonium are not so harmless elements of the periodic table, they lead to global catastrophes.
Atomic bomb
To understand what is the most powerful atomic bomb on the planet, we will learn more about everything. Hydrogen and atomic bombs belong to the nuclear power industry. If you combine two pieces of uranium, but each will have a mass below the critical mass, then this "union" will greatly exceed the critical mass. Each neutron participates in a chain reaction, because it splits the nucleus and releases 2-3 more neutrons, which cause new decay reactions.
Neutron force is completely beyond human control. In less than a second, hundreds of billions of newly formed decays not only release a huge amount of energy, but also become sources of the strongest radiation. This radioactive rain covers the earth, fields, plants and all living things in a thick layer. If we talk about the disasters in Hiroshima, we can see that 1 gram caused the death of 200 thousand people.
Working principle and advantages of vacuum bomb
It is believed that the vacuum bomb, created by the latest technologies, can compete with nuclear. The fact is that instead of TNT, a gas substance is used here, which is several tens of times more powerful. aircraft bomb increased power - the most powerful vacuum bomb in the world, which does not apply to nuclear weapons. It can destroy the enemy, but at the same time houses and equipment will not be damaged, and there will be no decay products.
What is the principle of its work? Immediately after dropping from a bomber, a detonator fires at some distance from the ground. The hull collapses and a huge cloud is dispersed. When mixed with oxygen, it begins to penetrate anywhere - into houses, bunkers, shelters. The burning of oxygen forms a vacuum everywhere. When this bomb is dropped, a supersonic wave is produced and a very high temperature is generated.
The difference between an American vacuum bomb and a Russian one
The differences are that the latter can destroy the enemy, even in the bunker, with the help of an appropriate warhead. During the explosion in the air, the warhead falls and hits the ground hard, burrowing to a depth of 30 meters. After the explosion, a cloud is formed, which, increasing in size, can penetrate shelters and explode there. American warheads, on the other hand, are filled with ordinary TNT, which is why they destroy buildings. vacuum bomb destroys certain object, because it has a smaller radius. It doesn't matter which bomb is the most powerful - any of them delivers an incomparable destructive blow that affects all living things.
H-bomb
The hydrogen bomb is another terrible nuclear weapon. The combination of uranium and plutonium generates not only energy, but also a temperature that rises to a million degrees. Hydrogen isotopes combine into helium nuclei, which creates a source of colossal energy. The hydrogen bomb is the most powerful - this is an indisputable fact. It is enough just to imagine that its explosion is equal to the explosions of 3000 atomic bombs in Hiroshima. Both in the USA and former USSR you can count 40 thousand bombs of various capacities - nuclear and hydrogen.
The explosion of such ammunition is comparable to the processes that are observed inside the Sun and stars. Fast neutrons with great speed split the uranium shells of the bomb itself. Not only heat is released, but also radioactive fallout. There are up to 200 isotopes. The production of such nuclear weapons is cheaper than nuclear weapons, and their effect can be increased as many times as desired. This is the most powerful detonated bomb that was tested in the Soviet Union on August 12, 1953.
Consequences of the explosion
The result of the explosion of the hydrogen bomb is threefold. The very first thing that happens is a powerful blast wave is observed. Its power depends on the height of the explosion and the type of terrain, as well as the degree of transparency of the air. Large fiery hurricanes can form that do not calm down for several hours. Yet the secondary and most dangerous consequence, which the most powerful thermonuclear bomb can cause is radiation and infection surrounding area for a long time.
Radioactive residue from the explosion of a hydrogen bomb
When the fireball explodes, it contains many very small radioactive particles that are trapped in atmospheric layer land and stay there for a long time. Upon contact with the ground, this fireball creates incandescent dust, consisting of particles of decay. First, a large one settles, and then a lighter one, which, with the help of the wind, spreads over hundreds of kilometers. These particles can be seen with the naked eye, for example, such dust can be seen on the snow. She leads to lethal outcome if anyone is nearby. Most small particles can be in the atmosphere for many years and so “travel”, flying around the entire planet several times. Their radioactive emission will become weaker by the time they fall out in the form of precipitation.
Its explosion is capable of wiping Moscow off the face of the earth in a matter of seconds. The city center would easily evaporate in the truest sense of the word, and everything else could turn into the smallest rubble. The most powerful bomb in the world would have wiped out New York with all the skyscrapers. After it, a twenty-kilometer molten smooth crater would have remained. With such an explosion, it would not have been possible to escape by going down the subway. The entire territory within a radius of 700 kilometers would be destroyed and infected with radioactive particles.
The explosion of the "Tsar bomb" - to be or not to be?
In the summer of 1961, scientists decided to test and observe the explosion. The most powerful bomb in the world was supposed to explode at a test site located in the very north of Russia. The huge area of the polygon occupies the entire territory of the island of Novaya Zemlya. The scale of the defeat was to be 1000 kilometers. The explosion could have left such industrial centers as Vorkuta, Dudinka and Norilsk infected. Scientists, having comprehended the scale of the disaster, took up their heads and realized that the test was cancelled.
Places to test the famous and incredible powerful bomb was nowhere on the planet, only Antarctica remained. But on ice continent it also failed to carry out an explosion, since the territory is considered international and it is simply unrealistic to obtain permission for such tests. I had to reduce the charge of this bomb by 2 times. The bomb was nevertheless detonated on October 30, 1961 in the same place - on the island of Novaya Zemlya (at an altitude of about 4 kilometers). During the explosion, a monstrous huge atomic mushroom was observed, which rose up to 67 kilometers, and the shock wave circled the planet three times. By the way, in the museum "Arzamas-16", in the city of Sarov, you can watch a newsreel of the explosion on an excursion, although they say that this spectacle is not for the faint of heart.
From Hiroshima to Kazakhstan
In 1943, the United States began the Manhattan Project to create the first weapons in history. mass destruction- the atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945, the Americans conducted the first test at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico, and on August 6 and 9 they dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around the same time, the USSR began developing its own nuclear weapons.
The first tests of the Soviet nuclear bomb took place in August 1949 in the Semipalatinsk region of the Kazakh SSR. The explosion power of the RDS-1 bomb was 22 kilotons of TNT. In the 1950s, both superpowers began to develop a thermonuclear device several times more powerful than atomic bomb. From 1952 to 1954, first the United States and then the USSR tested such devices. The energy release during the explosion of the American "Castle Bravo" amounted to 15 thousand kilotons of TNT. The first Soviet hydrogen bomb RDS-6s was several thousand times inferior in performance to its competitor from the United States.
Spy Powers
By the end of the 1950s, the superpowers were trying to negotiate mutual disarmament. However, neither the talks between the leaders of the USSR and the USA, nor the discussion of this issue at the XIV and XV sessions General Assembly The UN (1959-1960) did not bring results.
The aggravation of the confrontation between the US and the USSR predetermined a number of events. First, both powers were haunted by the issue of the status of West Berlin. The USSR did not like that European countries and the United States deployed its troops in this sector. Nikita Khrushchev demanded the demilitarization of West Berlin. The countries planned to discuss this issue at the Paris Conference in May 1960, but the events of May 1 prevented this. On that day, an American reconnaissance aircraft, piloted by Francis Powers, again violated Soviet airspace. The pilot's task was to photograph military enterprises, including those related to the nuclear industry. Powers' plane was shot down over Sverdlovsk by a ground-to-air missile.
The subsequent events of the summer of 1961 - the construction of the Berlin Wall and the American military intervention in Cuba to overthrow the socialist regime of Fidel Castro - led to the fact that on August 31, 1961 Soviet government decided to resume nuclear weapons testing.
"We will have a bomb"
The development of thermonuclear weapons in the USSR has been carried out since 1954 under the leadership of Igor Kurchatov and a group of physicists: Andrei Sakharov, Viktor Adamsky, Yuri Babaev, Yuri Smirnov, Yuri Trutnev and others. By 1959, preparations for the test were completed, but Nikita Khrushchev ordered the launch to be postponed - he hoped to improve relations with the United States. As the events of 1959-1961 showed, Western countries and the American leadership did not want to meet each other halfway. The USSR decided to resume preparations for testing weapons. The power of the created AN602 bomb reached 100 megatons. in the West due to huge size and its power was called the Tsar Bomba. She was also known as Kuzka's mother - this name was associated with the famous expression of Nikita Khrushchev, who, at a meeting with US Vice President Richard Nixon, promised to show Kuzka's mother to the West. The bomb had no official name. The creators of the thermonuclear device themselves designated it with the code word "Ivan" or simply "product B".
The tests were decided to be carried out at the test site of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, and the bomb itself was assembled at the secret regime enterprise Arzamas-16. On July 10, 1961, one of the developers of the bomb, Andrei Sakharov, sent a note to Khrushchev, in which he noted that the resumption nuclear testing threatens to escalate the conflict and bury the idea of a treaty on mutual renunciation of nuclear tests. Khrushchev did not agree with the academician and insisted on continuing preparations for the tests.
On September 8, 1961, the first reports of an impending explosion appeared in The New York Times. Nikita Khrushchev said:
“Let those who dream of new aggression know that we will have a bomb equal in power to 100 million tons of trinitrotoluene, that we already have such a bomb and we only have to test an explosive device for it.”
- A copy of the "Tsar Bomba", presented in the exposition of the exhibition "70 years of the nuclear industry. Chain reaction of success"
- RIA News
"We will not blow up such a bomb"
During September - the first half of October in Arzamas-16, final preparations were made for testing the bomb. At the XXII Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev announced a reduction in the power of the bomb by half - to 50 megatons:
“...I want to say that we are also very successful in testing new nuclear weapons. We will complete these tests soon. Apparently at the end of October. In conclusion, we will probably detonate a hydrogen bomb with a capacity of 50 million tons of TNT. We said that we have a bomb of 100 million tons of TNT. And that's right. But we will not detonate such a bomb, because if we detonate it even in the most remote places, then even then we can knock out our windows.
In parallel, the carrier aircraft was being prepared. Due to its size - about 8 meters long and 2 meters across - the bomb did not fit in the Tu-95. In order to still place it on the plane, the designers cut out part of the Tu-95 body and installed a special mount in it. Even so, the bomb was half sticking out of the plane. In the 20th of October, a thermonuclear device was delivered in strict secrecy from Arzamas-16 to the Olenya air base on Kola Peninsula, where it was loaded onto the Tu-95.
“The bomb was unusually large”
On the morning of October 30, two planes took off from the air base towards Novaya Zemlya: Tu-95, the carrier of the Tsar Bomba, and the Tu-16 laboratory plane, on which documentary filmmakers were. The bomb weighed more than 26 tons (its own weight with a parachute), which caused certain difficulties in its transportation. Viktor Adamsky recalled:
“Inside the bomb, a worker was sitting up to his chest and soldering something, I had an involuntary comparison with a pilot in a fighter - the bomb was so unusually large. Its dimensions also amazed the imagination of the designers.
Two hours after departure, the bomb was dropped at an altitude of about 10 thousand meters within nuclear test site Dry Nose. At 11:33 Moscow time, when parachute system dropped to a height of 4.2 thousand meters, the bomb was activated. A blinding flash followed, and the stem of the nuclear fungus rose up. The seismic wave from the explosion circled the globe three times. In 40 seconds, the mushroom grew to 30 km, and then expanded to 67 km. The carrier aircraft was at that moment approximately 45 km from the drop site. At 270 km from the point of explosion, the effect of a light pulse was felt. Residential houses were destroyed in nearby villages. Radio communication was lost for hundreds of kilometers from the test site. Yuri Trutnev, one of the developers of the bomb, recalled this:
"They were leaving last seconds before the explosion... And suddenly the connection with the crew of the aircraft and ground-based range services completely stopped. This was a sign that the bomb had worked. But no one knew for sure what really happened. We had to go through a long 40 minutes of anxiety and expectations.
"The spectacle was fantastic"
Only after the aircraft returned safely to base was the information confirmed that the thermonuclear device had worked. One of the cameramen on board the Tu-16 recalled:
“It’s creepy to fly, one might say, riding a hydrogen bomb! Will it suddenly work? Although it is on the fuses, but still ... And there will be no molecule left! Unbridled power in it, and what! The flight time to the target is not very long, but it drags on ... The bomb went and drowned in a gray-white mess. Here the doors slammed shut. Afterburner pilots leave the drop site... Zero! Under the plane from below and somewhere in the distance, the clouds are illuminated by a powerful flash. Here is the illumination! Behind the hatch, light simply spilled out - a sea, an ocean of light, and even layers of clouds were highlighted, manifested. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal ... in any case, unearthly.
The scientists involved in the development of the Tsar Bomba were well aware that it would not be used for military purposes. Testing a device of such power was nothing more than a political action. Julius Khariton, chief designer and scientific director Arzamas-16, noted:
“Still felt that this was more of a demonstration than the beginning of the use of such powerful nuclear devices. Undoubtedly, Khrushchev wanted to show: Soviet Union He is well versed in the design of nuclear weapons and is the owner of the most powerful charge in the world. It was more of a political than a technical move."
The Tsar Bomb had a stunning effect on the leadership of many countries. It remains the most powerful explosive device in history. Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda sent a telegram to Nikita Khrushchev, where he told how indescribable horror and shock this event plunged him into. In the United States, the day after the explosion, an issue of The New York Times was published, which said that by such actions the Soviet Union wanted to plunge American society into horror and panic.
On August 5, 1963, the USSR, the United States and Great Britain signed an agreement in Moscow banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.
Edward Epstein
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