Wow! Previously classified film of the Soviet Union’s 1961 Tsar Bomba test has been released by a Russian nuclear energy agency. Hydrogen bombs, the world’s most lethal weapons, have no theoretical size limit – add more fuel, and the explosion grows larger and larger.
The Russian nuclear energy agency, Rosatom, published a 30-minute, previously secret documentary video about the world’s largest hydrogen bomb detonation last week. The device, dubbed Tsar Bomba, or the Tsar’s bomb, and detonated on October 30, 1961, had an explosive power of 50 megatons, or the equivalent of 50 million tons of conventional explosive. That made it 3,333 times more powerful than the weapon used on Hiroshima, Japan, and far more powerful than the 15 megaton weapon used by the United States in its greatest hydrogen bomb burst in 1954.
The Russian Tsar Bomba: When it detonated in 1961, it generated enough energy to equal 50 MILLION tons of TNT. The Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba nuclear bomb over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in northern Russia on October 30, 1961.
“This is the most powerful device ever built” (and subsequently responsible for the biggest nuclear explosion in history). This Soviet-designed nuclear weapon, known as the Tsar Bomba, had a destructive power 10 times that of all conventional explosives used in World War II, and was 3000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The Tsar Bomba weighed 27 metric tons and required a specially constructed jet to transport it to the release site. And on October 30, 1961, the bomb was dropped from an altitude of 6.5 miles above a remote Arctic Ocean island. Because the nuclear weapon was so strong, a parachute was deployed to delay the plane’s descent and give the crew time to escape the detonation.
When the bomb exploded, it unleashed an energy yield equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT and produced a massive fireball visible from 500 miles away. The bomb absolutely destroyed everything within a 22-mile radius and damaged windows thousands of miles away in Norway and Finland.”
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