Terms 

Nuclear myths and atomic reality. The true scale of nuclear explosions Preparing for testing

Seventy years ago, on July 16, 1945, the United States conducted the first nuclear test in human history. Since then, we have made a lot of progress: at the moment, more than two thousand tests of this incredibly destructive means of destruction have been officially recorded on Earth. Here is a dozen of the largest explosions of nuclear bombs, from each of which the whole planet shuddered.

On August 25 and September 19, 1962, with a break of just a month, the USSR conducted nuclear tests over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Naturally, no video or photography was conducted. It is now known that both bombs had a TNT equivalent of 10 megatons. An explosion of one charge would destroy all life within four square kilometers.

Castle Bravo

On March 1, 1954, the world's largest nuclear weapon was tested on Bikini Atoll. The explosion was three times stronger than the scientists themselves expected. A cloud of radioactive waste carried towards the inhabited atolls, the population subsequently recorded numerous cases of radiation sickness.

Evie Mike

This was the world's first test of a thermonuclear explosive device. The United States decided to test a hydrogen bomb near the Marshall Islands. Evie Mike's detonation was so powerful that it simply evaporated the island of Elugelab, where the tests took place.

Castle Romero

Romero decided to take out to the open sea on a barge and blow it up there. Not for the sake of some new discoveries, it's just that the United States no longer had free islands where one could safely test nuclear weapons. The explosion of Castle Romero in TNT amounted to 11 megatons. A detonation would occur on land, and a scorched wasteland would spread around within a radius of three kilometers.

Trial No. 123

On October 23, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted a nuclear test, code number 123. A poisonous flower of a 12.5 megaton radioactive explosion bloomed over Novaya Zemlya. Such an explosion could cause third-degree burns to people in an area of ​​2,700 square kilometers.

Castle Yankee

The second launch of the Castle series nuclear device took place on May 4, 1954. The TNT equivalent of the bomb was 13.5 megatons, and four days later the consequences of the explosion covered Mexico City - the city was 15 thousand kilometers from the test site.

Tsar bomb

The engineers and physicists of the Soviet Union managed to create the most powerful nuclear device ever tested. The explosion energy of the Tsar bomb was 58.6 megatons of TNT. On October 30, 1961, the nuclear mushroom rose to a height of 67 kilometers, and the fireball from the explosion reached a radius of 4.7 kilometers.

From 5 to 27 September 1962, a series of nuclear tests were conducted in the USSR on Novaya Zemlya. Tests No. 173, No. 174 and No. 147 are in fifth, fourth and third places in the list of the strongest nuclear explosions in history. All three devices were equal to 200 megatons of TNT.

Trial No. 219

Another test with serial number No. 219 took place in the same place, on Novaya Zemlya. The bomb had a yield of 24.2 megatons. An explosion of that magnitude would burn out everything within 8 square kilometers.

The Big One

One of America's biggest military failures came during the testing of The Big One's hydrogen bomb. The force of the explosion exceeded the power estimated by scientists by five times. Radioactive contamination has been observed in large parts of the United States. The diameter of the crater from the explosion was 75 meters deep and two kilometers in diameter. If such a thing fell on Manhattan, then all of New York would be just memories.

The 20th century was oversaturated with events: two World Wars, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis (which almost led to a new global clash), the fall of communist ideology and the rapid development of technology fit into it. During this period, the development of a wide variety of weapons was carried out, but the leading powers sought to develop precisely weapons of mass destruction.

Many projects were curtailed, but the Soviet Union managed to create weapons of unprecedented power. We are talking about the AN602, known to the general public as the "Tsar Bomba", created during the arms race. Development was carried out for quite a long time, but the final tests were successful.

History of creation

The "Tsar Bomba" was a natural result of the period of the arms race between America and the USSR, the confrontation of these two systems. The USSR received atomic weapons later than its competitor and wanted to equalize its military potential through advanced, more powerful devices.

The choice logically fell on the development of thermonuclear weapons: hydrogen bombs were more powerful than conventional nuclear projectiles.

Even before the Second World War, scientists came to the conclusion that with the help of thermonuclear fusion it is possible to extract energy. During the war, Germany, the USA and the USSR were developing thermonuclear weapons, and the Soviets and America already by the 50s. began to carry out the first explosions.

The post-war period and the beginning of the Cold War made the creation of weapons of mass destruction a priority for the leading powers.

Initially, the idea was to create not the Tsar Bomba, but the Tsar Torpedo (the project received the abbreviation T-15). She, due to the lack at that time of the necessary aviation and rocket carriers of thermonuclear weapons, had to be launched from a submarine.

Its explosion was supposed to cause a devastating tsunami on the coast of the United States. After a closer study, the project was curtailed, recognizing it as doubtful from the standpoint of real combat effectiveness.

Name

"Tsar Bomba" had several abbreviations:

  • AN 602 ("product 602);
  • RDS-202 and RN202 (both are erroneous).

There were other names in use (which came from the West):

  • "Big Ivan";
  • "Kuzka's mother".

The name "Kuzka's mother" takes its roots from Khrushchev's statement: "We will show America Kuzka's mother!"

They began to unofficially call this weapon "Tsar Bomba" because of its unprecedented power compared to all really tested carriers.

An interesting fact: "Kuzkina's mother" had a power comparable to the explosion of 3,800 Hiroshima, therefore, in theory, the "Tsar Bomb" really carried the Soviet-style apocalypse to the enemies.

Development

The bomb was developed in the USSR from 1954 to 1961. The order came personally from Khrushchev. The project involved a group of nuclear physicists, the best minds of the time:

  • HELL. Sakharov;
  • V.B. Adamsky;
  • Yu.N. Babaev;
  • S.G. Kocharyants;
  • Yu.N. Smirnov;
  • Yu.A. Trutnev and others.

The development was led by Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR I.V. Kurchatov. The entire staff of scientists, in addition to creating a bomb, sought to identify the limits of the maximum power of thermonuclear weapons. AN 602 was developed as a smaller version of the RN202 explosive device. In comparison with the original idea (the mass reached up to 40 tons), it really lost weight.


The idea of ​​delivering a 40-ton bomb was rejected by A.N. Tupolev due to inconsistency and inapplicability in practice. Not a single Soviet aircraft of those times could lift it.

In the last stages of development, the bomb has changed:

  1. They changed the material of the shell and reduced the dimensions of the “mother of Kuzma”: it was a cylindrical body 8 m long and about 2 m in diameter, which had streamlined shapes and tail stabilizers.
  2. They reduced the power of the explosion, thereby slightly reducing the weight (the uranium shell began to weigh 2,800 kg, and the total mass of the bomb decreased to 24 tons).
  3. Her descent was carried out using a parachute system. She slowed down the fall of the ammunition, which allowed the bomber to leave the epicenter of the explosion in a timely manner.

Tests

The mass of the thermonuclear device was 15% of the take-off mass of the bomber. In order for it to be freely located in the drop bay, the fuselage fuel tanks were removed from it. A new, more load-bearing beam holder (BD-242), equipped with three bomber locks, was responsible for keeping the projectile in the bomb bay. For the release of the bomb was responsible for electric, so that all three locks were opened simultaneously.

Khrushchev announced the planned weapons tests already at the XXII Congress of the CPSU in 1961, as well as during meetings with foreign diplomats. On October 30, 1961, AN602 was delivered from the Olenya airfield to the Novaya Zemlya training ground.

The flight of the bomber took 2 hours, the projectile was dropped from a height of 10,500 m.

The explosion took place at 11:33 Moscow time after being dropped from a height of 4,000 m above the target. The bomb's flight time was 188 seconds. The aircraft that delivered the bomb flew 39 km from the drop zone during this time, and the laboratory aircraft (Tu-95A) that accompanied the carrier flew 53 km.

The shock wave caught up with the car at a distance of 115 km from the target: the vibration was felt significant, about 800 meters of altitude was lost, but this did not affect the further flight. The reflective paint was burned out in some places, and parts of the aircraft were damaged (some even melted).

The final power of the Tsar Bomb explosion (58.6 megatons) exceeded the planned one (51.5 megatons).


After the operation summed up:

  1. The fireball resulting from the explosion had a diameter of about 4.6 km. In theory, it could grow to the surface of the earth, but thanks to the reflected shock wave, this did not happen.
  2. The light radiation would have resulted in 3rd degree burns to anyone within 100 km of the target.
  3. The resulting mushroom reached 67 km. in height, and its diameter at the upper tier reached 95 km.
  4. The atmospheric pressure wave after the explosion circled the earth three times, moving at an average speed of 303 m / s (9.9 degrees of the arc of a circle per hour).
  5. People who were 1000 km. from the explosion, felt it.
  6. The sound wave reached a distance of approximately 800 km, but no destruction or damage was officially identified in the surrounding areas.
  7. Atmospheric ionization led to radio interference at a distance of several hundred kilometers from the explosion and lasted 40 minutes.
  8. Radioactive contamination in the epicenter (2-3 km) from the explosion was about 1 milliroentgen per hour. 2 hours after the operation, the contamination was practically not dangerous. According to the official version, no one was killed.
  9. The funnel formed after the explosion of the Kuzkina Mother was not huge for a bomb with a yield of 58,000 kilotons. It exploded in the air, above the rocky ground. The location of the Tsar Bomb explosion on the map showed that it was about 200 m in diameter.
  10. After the dump, thanks to the fusion reaction (virtually leaving no radioactive contamination), there was a relative purity of more than 97%.

Consequences of the test

Traces of the detonation of the Tsar Bomba are still preserved on the Novaya Zemlya. It was about the most powerful explosive device in the history of mankind. The Soviet Union demonstrated to the rest of the powers that it possessed advanced weapons of mass destruction.


Science as a whole also benefited from the test of AN 602. The experiment made it possible to test the principles of calculation and design of thermonuclear charges of the multistage type that were then in force. It has been experimentally proven that:

  1. The power of a thermonuclear charge, in fact, is not limited by anything (theoretically, the Americans concluded this 3 years before the bomb explosion).
  2. The cost of increasing the charge power can be calculated. At 1950 prices, one kiloton of TNT cost 60 cents (for example, an explosion comparable to the bombing of Hiroshima cost $10).

Prospects for practical use

AN602 is not ready for use in combat. Under conditions of fire on the carrier aircraft, the bomb (comparable in size to a small whale) could not be delivered to the target. Rather, its creation and testing was an attempt to demonstrate technology.

Later, in 1962, a new weapon was tested at Novaya Zemlya (a test site in the Arkhangelsk region), a thermonuclear charge made in the AN602 case, the tests were carried out several times:

  1. Its mass was 18 tons, and its capacity was 20 megatons.
  2. Delivery was carried out from heavy strategic bombers 3M and Tu-95.

The reset confirmed that thermonuclear aviation bombs of smaller mass and power are easier to manufacture and use in combat conditions. The new ammunition was still more destructive than those dropped on Hiroshima (20 kilotons) and Nagasaki (18 kilotons).


Using the experience of creating the AN602, the Soviets developed warheads of even greater power, mounted on super-heavy combat missiles:

  1. Global: UR-500 (could be implemented under the name "Proton").
  2. Orbital: H-1 (on its basis, they later tried to create a launch vehicle that would deliver the Soviet expedition to the moon).

As a result, the Russian bomb was not developed, but indirectly influenced the course of the arms race. Later, the creation of the "Kuzkina Mother" formed the concept of the development of the strategic nuclear forces of the USSR - the "Nuclear Doctrine of Malenkov-Khrushchev".

Device and specifications

The bomb was similar to the RN202 model, but had a number of design changes:

  1. Other centering.
  2. 2-stage explosion initiation system. The nuclear charge of the 1st stage (1.5 megatons of the total explosion power) triggered a thermonuclear reaction in the 2nd stage (with lead components).

The detonation of the charge occurred as follows:

First, there is an explosion of a low-power initiator charge, closed inside the NV shell (in fact, a miniature atomic bomb with a capacity of 1.5 megatons). As a result of a powerful emission of neutrons and high temperature, thermonuclear fusion begins in the main charge.


The neutrons destroy the deuterium-lithium insert (a compound of deuterium and an isotope of lithium-6). As a result of a chain reaction, lithium-6 is split into tritium and helium. As a result, the atomic fuse contributes to the onset of thermonuclear fusion in the detonated charge.

Tritium and deuterium mix, a thermonuclear reaction starts: inside the bomb, the temperature and pressure rapidly rise, the kinetic energy of the nuclei grows, facilitating mutual penetration with the formation of new, heavier elements. The main reaction products are free helium and fast neurons.

Fast neutrons are capable of splitting atoms from the uranium shell, which also generate huge energy (about 18 Mt). The process of fission of uranium-238 nuclei is activated. All of the above contributes to the formation of an explosive wave and the release of a huge amount of heat, due to which the fireball grows.

Each atom of uranium decays into 2 radioactive parts, resulting in up to 36 different chemical elements and about 200 radioactive isotopes. And because of this, radioactive fallout appears, which, after the explosion of the Tsar Bomba, was registered at a distance of hundreds of kilometers from the test site.

The charge and decomposition scheme of the elements are designed in such a way that all these processes proceed instantly.

The design allows you to increase power with virtually no restrictions, and, in comparison with standard atomic bombs, saving money and time.

At first, a 3-stage system was planned (as planned, the second stage activated nuclear fission in blocks from the 3rd stage, which had a component of uranium-238), initiating a nuclear "Jekyll-Hyde reaction", but it was removed due to the potentially high level of radioactive pollution. This led to half the estimated explosion power (from 101.5 megatons to 51.5).

The final version differed from the original one by a lower level of radioactive contamination after the explosion. As a result, the bomb lost more than half of its planned charge power, but this was justified by scientists. They were afraid that the earth's crust might not withstand such a powerful impact. It was for this reason that they called out not on the ground but in the air.


It was necessary to prepare not only the bomb, but also the aircraft responsible for its delivery and release. This was beyond the power of a conventional bomber. The aircraft must have:

  • Reinforced suspension;
  • Appropriate design of the bomb bay;
  • Reset device;
  • Coated with reflective paint.

These tasks were solved after revising the dimensions of the bomb itself and making it a carrier of huge nuclear bombs (in the end, this model was adopted by the Soviets and received the name Tu-95V).

Rumors and hoaxes related to AN 602

It was rumored that the final yield of the explosion was 120 megatons. Such projects have taken place (say, the combat version of the global missile UR-500, the planned capacity of which is 150 megatons), but have not been implemented.

There was a rumor that the initial charge power was 2 times higher than the final one.

They reduced it (except for the above) because of the fear of the appearance of a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction in the atmosphere. It is curious that similar warnings had previously come from scientists who developed the first atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project).

The last misconception is about the occurrence of the "geological" consequences of weapons. It was believed that the detonation of the original version of the "Ivan bomb" could break through the earth's crust to the mantle if it exploded on the ground, and not in the air. This is not true - the diameter of the funnel after a ground detonation of a bomb, for example, one megaton, is approximately 400 m, and its depth is up to 60 m.


Calculations showed that the explosion of the Tsar Bomba on the surface would lead to the appearance of a funnel with a diameter of 1.5 km and a depth of up to 200 m. The fireball that appeared after the explosion of the "King of the Bomb" would have erased the city on which it fell, and in its place a large crater would have formed. The shockwave would have destroyed the suburb, and all survivors would have received 3rd and 4th degree burns. It might not have broken through the mantle, but earthquakes, and all over the world, would have been guaranteed.

conclusions

The Tsar Bomba was indeed a grandiose project and a symbol of that crazy era when the great powers sought to overtake each other in creating weapons of mass destruction. A demonstration of the power of the new weapons of mass destruction was held.

For comparison, the United States, which was previously considered the leader in terms of nuclear potential, had the most powerful thermonuclear bomb in service, which had a power (in TNT equivalent) 4 times less than that of the AN 602.

The "Tsar Bomba" was dropped from the carrier, while the Americans blew up their projectile in the hangar.

For a number of technical and military nuances, they switched to the development of less spectacular, but more effective weapons. It is not practical to produce 50 and 100 megaton bombs: these are single items, suitable only for political pressure.

"Kuzkina's mother" helped develop negotiations on a ban on testing of weapons of mass destruction in 3 environments. As a result, the USA, the USSR and Great Britain signed the treaty already in 1963. The President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (the main "scientific center of the Soviets of that time") Mstislav Keldysh said that Soviet science sees its goal in the further development and strengthening of peace.

Video

The device will be designed to destroy the fortified naval bases of a potential enemy, a TASS source noted.

The Poseidon unmanned underwater vehicle being created in Russia will be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead with a capacity of up to 2 megatons to destroy enemy naval bases. This was reported to TASS on Thursday by a source in the military-industrial complex.

“It will be possible to install various nuclear charges on the“ torpedo ”of the Poseidon multi-purpose marine system, the monoblock thermonuclear warhead, similar to the Avagard charge, will have the maximum power - up to two megatons in TNT equivalent,” the agency’s interlocutor told TASS.

He specified that the nuclear-powered device would be “primarily designed to destroy the fortified naval bases of a potential enemy.” Thanks to the nuclear power plant, the source said, "Poseidon" will go to the target at an intercontinental range at a depth of more than 1 km at a speed of 60-70 knots (110-130 km / h).

TASS does not have official confirmation of the information provided by the source.

As another source in the defense industry told TASS earlier, the Poseidon will be included in the combat structure of the Navy as part of the current armament program for 2018-2027, and a new specialized submarine being built at Sevmash will become its carrier.

"Poseidon"

Russian President Vladimir Putin first spoke about the unmanned underwater vehicle with a nuclear power plant being created in Russia in his address to the Federal Assembly in March of this year. The President then said that these drones can be equipped with both conventional and nuclear weapons and will be able to destroy enemy infrastructure, aircraft carrier groups, and so on.

As Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Sergei Korolev later clarified, the new weapon will allow the fleet to solve a wide range of tasks in water areas near enemy territory. According to the commander-in-chief, the main element of the drone, a small-sized nuclear power plant, has already been tested.

Poseidon vehicles, together with carriers - nuclear submarines - are part of the so-called ocean multipurpose system. The drone got its name in the course of an open vote on the website of the Ministry of Defense.

In 1961, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb of such magnitude that it would have been 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 air base on the Kola Peninsula, in the far north of Russia.

This Tu-95 was a specially improved version of an aircraft that had entered service a few years earlier; a large, sprawling, four-engine monster that was supposed to carry an arsenal of Soviet nuclear bombs.

During that decade, there were huge breakthroughs in Soviet nuclear research. The Second World War placed the US and the USSR in the same camp, but the post-war period was replaced by a cold in relations, and then their freezing. And the Soviet Union, which was faced with the fact of rivalry from 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 "Joe-1" in the West, in the remote steppes of Kazakhstan, assembling it from the work of spies who infiltrated the American atomic bomb program. During the years of intervention, the test program quickly took off and began, and during its course, about 80 devices were blown up; in 1958 alone, the USSR tested 36 nuclear bombs.

But nothing compares to this ordeal.

The Tu-95 carried a huge bomb under its belly. It was too large to fit inside the aircraft's bomb bay, where such munitions were normally carried. The bombs were 8 meters long, about 2.6 meters in diameter and weighed more than 27 tons. Physically, she was very similar in form to the "Kid" and "Fat Man" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fifteen years earlier. In the USSR, she was called both "Kuzkina's mother" and "Tsar Bomba", and the last name was well preserved for her.

The Tsar bomb was not the most common nuclear bomb. It was the result of a feverish attempt by Soviet scientists to create the most powerful nuclear weapon and thereby support Nikita Khrushchev's ambition to make the world tremble at the might of Soviet technology. It was more than a metal monster, too big to fit even the largest aircraft. It was the destroyer of cities, the ultimate weapon.

This Tupolev, painted bright white to reduce the effect of a bomb flash, has reached its destination. Novaya Zemlya, a sparsely populated archipelago in the Barents Sea, above the frozen northern reaches of the USSR. The pilot of the Tupolev, Major Andrey Durnovtsev, delivered the aircraft to the Soviet test site at Mityushikha to an altitude of about 10 kilometers. A small advanced Tu-16 bomber was flying nearby, ready to film the impending explosion and take air samples from the explosion zone for further analysis.

In order for two aircraft to have 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 from it. This should have been enough to survive the explosion.

The Tsar bomb was detonated at 11:32 Moscow time. A fireball almost 10 kilometers wide formed at the site of the explosion. 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 its hat expanded until it spread 100 kilometers from edge to edge. The sight must have been indescribable.

For Novaya Zemlya, the consequences were catastrophic. In the village of Severny, 55 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion, all the houses were completely destroyed. It was reported that in the Soviet regions, hundreds of kilometers from the zone, the explosions caused damage of all kinds - houses collapsed, roofs sagged, windows flew out, doors were broken. The radio was out of service for an hour.

"Tupolev" Durnovtsev was lucky; the blast wave of the Tsar Bomba 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 at a distance from it were illuminated by a powerful flash. The sea of ​​light parted under the hatch and even the clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our plane was between two layers of clouds and below, in the crevice, a huge, bright, orange ball bloomed. The ball was powerful and majestic, like. Slowly and quietly he crept up. Having broken through a thick layer of clouds, it continued to grow. It seemed to suck the whole earth. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.”

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

Such an explosion cannot be kept secret. The United States had a spy plane a few dozen kilometers from the explosion. It contained a special optical device, the bhangemeter, useful for calculating the strength of distant nuclear explosions. Data from this aircraft - codenamed Speedlight - was used by the Foreign Arms Evaluation Panel to calculate the results of this clandestine test.

International condemnation was not long in coming, not only from the United States and Great Britain, but also from the USSR's Scandinavian neighbors such as Sweden. The only bright spot in this mushroom cloud was that since the fireball had not touched the Earth, there was surprisingly little radiation.

Everything could be 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 very 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 involved 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 a reaction. Sakharov called her "puff". This breakthrough allowed the USSR to create the first hydrogen bomb, a device much more powerful than the atomic bombs were a few years before.

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

The Soviet Union needed to show that it could get ahead of the US in the nuclear arms race, according to Philip Coyle, former head of US nuclear weapons testing under President Bill Clinton. He spent 30 years helping build and test nuclear weapons. “The US was way ahead because of the work they had done preparing the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then they did a lot of atmospheric tests before the Russians did their first.”

“We were ahead and the Soviets were trying to do something to tell the world that they were worth reckoning with. The Tsar Bomba was primarily meant 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 a yield of 100 megatons. 3000 times more than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union had already tested large devices in the atmosphere, equivalent to several megatons, but this bomb would have become simply gigantic compared to those. Some scientists began to believe that it was too big.

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

That's 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 the genetic implications for future generations.”

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

Before the tests began, the layers of uranium that were supposed to disperse the bomb to incredible power were replaced by layers of lead, which reduced the intensity of the nuclear reaction.

The Soviet Union created such a powerful weapon that scientists were unwilling to test it at full power. And the problems with this destructive device were not limited to this.

Designed to carry the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, Tu-95 bombers were designed to carry much lighter weapons. The Tsar Bomba 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 stay with the right amount of fuel for the return. And in general, if the bomb were as powerful as it was intended, the planes might not return.

Even nuclear weapons can be too many, says Coyle, who is now a senior official 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 could destroy a target from a kilometer away. The direction of movement has changed - towards increasing the accuracy of missiles and the number of warheads.

The tsar bomb led to other consequences. It caused so much concern - five times more than any other test before it - that it led to a taboo against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing 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 partially mitigated by carbon from fossil fuels in the atmosphere.

Sakharov was worried that a bomb that would be larger than the tested one would not be repelled by its own blast wave - like the Tsar Bomba - and would cause global radioactive fallout, spread toxic dirt throughout the planet.

Sakharov became an outspoken supporter of the 1963 partial test ban and an outspoken critic of nuclear proliferation. And in the late 1960s, missile defense, which, 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 Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 and called "the conscience of mankind," says von Hippel.

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

According to the BBC