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. 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 mushroom cloud it created.Ī Soviet cameraman who recorded the event described the bomb as creating "a powerful 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." The blast was so powerful that its shock wave caused the release plane to immediately drop 3,281 feet (1 kilometer) in altitude, though the pilot regained control and got the plane back to its base safely. 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 and observer planes time to escape. Tsar Bomba's yield is estimated to have been roughly 57 megatons, about 1,500 times the combined power of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The nuclear bomb 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 nuclear bombs.
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