The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. Said one aerial eyewitness: “The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash.
#Largest fission bomb windows
Windows in faraway Norway and Finland were shattered by the force of the blast. Everything within three dozen miles of the impact was vaporized, but severe damage extended to 150 miles radius-enough to entirely annihilate any modern major city, including suburbs. I looked up fission in the encyclopedia and found that gamma. At 40 miles high, it penetrated the stratosphere. I learned that Oak Ridge has the nations largest H-bomb component factory: the Y-12 plant. The mushroom cloud was 25 miles wide at its base and almost 60 miles wide at its top. The Tsar Bomba’s yield was 50 megatons: ten times more powerful than all of the ordnance exploded during the whole of World War II.
The detonation was astronomically powerful-over 1,570 times more powerful, in fact, than the combined two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even so, the crewmen were told that they only had a 50 percent chance of survival (they barely made it.)Ī Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber. The bomb would be attached to a parachute to slow its descent to detonation at 13,000 feet, giving the bomber and its escort additional time to escape at least thirty miles away before detonation. A Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber was designated to deliver the device from 34,000 feet.
Sakharov also played a significant role in designing this weapon, which incorporated multiple inter-reacting stages and was 26 feet long, almost seven feet in diameter, and weighed almost 60,000 pounds. The site chosen for testing this device was Mityushikha Bay on Severny Island in the Arctic Circle. Great Britain emulated these with open air atomic weapons tests in the late 1950s (France would follow with tests in Polynesia in the 1960s and beyond.) While the Americans focused on perfecting accurate delivery systems for small to medium size atomic devices, however, the Soviets concentrated on building larger and larger devices of almost unimaginable power.
#Largest fission bomb series
Courtesy of The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) photo stream.įrom there the United States and the Soviet Union carried out a further series of open-air tests of atomic weapons. The Ivy Mike thermonuclear test, November 1, 1952.
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