The Tsar Bomb was too powerful for this world

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In 1961, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb of such strength that it would be too large for military use. And this event had far-reaching consequences of various kinds. That very morning, October 30, 1961, a Soviet Tu-95 bomber took off from the Olenya airbase on the Kola Peninsula, in the far north of Russia.

This Tu-95 was a specially improved version of the aircraft that entered service several years earlier; a large, loose, four-engined monster that was supposed to carry an arsenal of Soviet nuclear bombs.

In that decade, huge breakthroughs took place in Soviet nuclear research. The Second World War placed the USA and the USSR in one camp, but the post-war period was replaced by a cold relationship, and then a freeze. And the Soviet Union, which was faced with the fact of rivalry with one of the world's largest superpowers, had only one choice: to join the race, and quickly.

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device, known as the Joe-1, in the West, in the distant steppes of Kazakhstan, assembled from the work of spies who infiltrated the American atomic bomb program. Over the years of the intervention, the test program quickly took off and began, and during its course about 80 devices were detonated; in 1958 alone, the USSR tested 36 nuclear bombs.

But nothing beats this challenge.

The Tu-95 carried a huge bomb under its belly. It was too large to fit inside the bomb bay of an aircraft, where such ammunition was usually carried. The bomb was 8 meters long, about 2.6 meters in diameter and weighed over 27 tons. Physically, she was very similar in shape to the "Kid" and "Fat Man" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fifteen years earlier. In the USSR it was called both "Kuz'kina's mother" and "Tsar Bomba", and the last name was well preserved for her.

The Tsar Bomb was not an ordinary nuclear bomb. It was the result of a feverish attempt by Soviet scientists to create the most powerful nuclear weapons and thereby support Nikita Khrushchev's desire to make the world tremble from the power of Soviet technology. It was more than a metal monster, too big to fit into even the largest aircraft. It was the destroyer of cities, the ultimate weapon.

This Tupolev, painted bright white in order to reduce the effect of the flash of the bomb, has reached its destination. Novaya Zemlya, a sparsely populated archipelago in the Barents Sea, over the frozen northern edges of the USSR. The Tupolev pilot, Major Andrei Durnovtsev, brought the plane to the Soviet firing range on Mityushikha to an altitude of about 10 kilometers. A small, improved Tu-16 bomber flew alongside, ready to film the impending explosion and take air intakes from the explosion zone for further analysis.

So that two planes had a chance of surviving - and there were no more than 50% of them - the Tsar Bomba was equipped with a giant parachute weighing about a ton. The bomb was supposed to slowly descend to a predetermined height - 3940 meters - and then explode. And then, two bombers will be already 50 kilometers away. That should have been enough to survive the explosion.

The Tsar Bomb was detonated at 11:32 Moscow time. At the site of the explosion, a ball of fire formed almost 10 kilometers wide. The fireball rose higher under the influence of its own shock wave. The flash was visible from a distance of 1000 kilometers from everywhere.

The mushroom cloud at the site of the explosion grew 64 kilometers in height, and his hat expanded until it spread 100 kilometers from edge to edge. Surely the sight was indescribable.

For Novaya Zemlya, the consequences were catastrophic. In the village of Severny, 55 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion, all houses were completely destroyed. It was reported that in the Soviet regions, hundreds of kilometers from the zone of explosions, there was damage of all kinds - houses collapsed, roofs sagged, glass flew out, doors broke. The radio communication did not work for an hour.

Durnovtsev's Tupolev was lucky; The Tsar Bomba blast caused the giant bomber to fall 1,000 meters before the pilot could regain control of it.

One Soviet operator who witnessed the detonation recounted the following:

“The clouds under the plane and in the distance from it were illuminated by a powerful flash. A sea of light parted under the hatch and even the clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our plane found itself between two layers of clouds and below, in a crevice, a huge, bright, orange ball was blooming. The ball was as powerful and majestic as Jupiter. Slowly and quietly, he crept up. Having broken through a thick layer of clouds, it continued to grow. It seemed to have sucked in the entire Earth. The sight was fantastic, unreal, supernatural."

The Tsar Bomb has released incredible energy - now it is estimated at 57 megatons, or 57 million tons of TNT equivalent. This is 1,500 times more than both the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were released, and 10 times more powerful than all the ammunition used during World War II. The sensors registered the blast wave of the bomb, which went around the Earth not once, not twice, but three times.

Such an explosion cannot be kept secret. The United States had a spy plane several tens of kilometers from the explosion. It contained a special optical device, a bhangemeter, useful for calculating the strength of distant nuclear explosions. Data from this aircraft - codenamed Speedlight - were used by the Foreign Weapons Evaluation Group to calculate the results of this covert test.

International condemnation was not long in coming, not only from the United States and Great Britain, but also from the Scandinavian neighbors of the USSR, such as Sweden. The only bright spot in this mushroom cloud was that since the fireball did not make contact with the Earth, the radiation was startlingly low.

It could have been different. Initially, the Tsar Bomba was conceived twice as powerful.

One of the architects of this formidable device was the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, a man who would later become world famous for his attempts to rid the world of the very weapons he helped create. He was a veteran of the Soviet atomic bomb program from the beginning and became part of the team that created the first atomic bombs for the USSR.

Sakharov began work on a multilayer fission-fusion-fission device, a bomb that creates additional energy from nuclear processes in its core. This included wrapping deuterium - a stable isotope of hydrogen - in a layer of unenriched uranium. Uranium was supposed to capture neutrons from burning deuterium and also start the reaction. Sakharov called her "puff". This breakthrough allowed the USSR to create the first hydrogen bomb, a device much more powerful than atomic bombs were a few years earlier.

Khrushchev instructed Sakharov to come up with a bomb that was more powerful than all the others already tested by that time.

The Soviet Union needed to be shown that it could outpace the United States in the nuclear arms race, according to Philip Coyle, the former head of nuclear testing in the United States under President Bill Clinton. He spent 30 years helping to create and test atomic weapons. “The US was way ahead because of the work it did in preparing the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then they carried out many tests in the atmosphere even before the Russians did their first."

“We were ahead and the Soviets were trying to do something to tell the world that they should be reckoned with. The Tsar Bomba was primarily intended to make the world stop and recognize the Soviet Union as an equal,”says Coyle.

The original design - a three-layer bomb with uranium layers separating each stage - would have had an output of 100 megatons. 3000 times more than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By that time, the Soviet Union was already testing large devices in the atmosphere equivalent to several megatons, but this bomb would have become simply gigantic in comparison with those. Some scientists began to believe that it was too big.

With such tremendous force, there would be no guarantee that the giant bomb would not fall into a swamp in the north of the USSR, leaving behind a huge cloud of radioactive fallout.

This is what Sakharov feared, in part, says Frank von Hippel, a physicist and head of public and international affairs at Princeton University.

“He was really worried about the amount of radioactivity the bomb could create,” he says. "And about the genetic consequences for future generations."

"And that was the beginning of the journey from bomb designer to dissident."

Before testing began, the layers of uranium that were supposed to accelerate the bomb to incredible power were replaced with layers of lead, which reduced the intensity of the nuclear reaction.

The Soviet Union created such a powerful weapon that scientists did not want to test it at full power. And the problems with this destructive device did not stop there.

Built to carry nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union, Tu-95 bombers were designed to carry much lighter weapons. The Tsar Bomb was so large that it could not be placed on a rocket, and so heavy that the planes carrying it would not be able to deliver it to the target and be left with the right amount of fuel to return. Anyway, if the bomb was as powerful as it was conceived, the planes might not return.

Even nuclear weapons could be too many, says Coyle, who now serves as a lead officer at the Center for Arms Control in Washington. “It's hard to find a use for it unless you want to destroy very large cities,” he says. "It's just too big to use."

Von Hippel agrees. “These things (large free-falling nuclear bombs) were designed so that you can destroy a target from a kilometer away. The direction of movement has changed - in the direction of increasing the accuracy of missiles and the number of warheads."

The Tsar Bomb also led to other consequences. It raised so many concerns - five times more than any other test before it - that it led to a taboo on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in 1963. Von Hippel says Sakharov was particularly concerned about the amount of radioactive carbon-14 that was being released into the atmosphere, an isotope with a particularly long half-life. It was mitigated in part by carbon from fossil fuels in the atmosphere.

Sakharov worried that the bomb, which would be more tested, would not be repelled by its own blast wave - like the Tsar Bomb - and would cause global radioactive fallout, spreading toxic dirt throughout the planet.

Sakharov became an ardent supporter of the 1963 partial test ban and an outspoken critic of nuclear proliferation. And in the late 1960s - and missile defense, which, as he rightly believed, would spur a new nuclear arms race. He was increasingly ostracized by the state and went on to become a dissident who was awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize and called the "conscience of humanity," says von Hippel.

It seems that the Tsar Bomba caused precipitation of a completely different kind.