The Soviet Union tested the largest bomb ever built
On this day · 30 October 1961
On October 30, 1961, the USSR detonated the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba over the Arctic, the most powerful explosion humans have ever set off.
On 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union dropped the Tsar Bomba over Mityushikha Bay in the Arctic, on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. It remains the most powerful weapon ever detonated, by any nation, of any kind.
The blast yielded about 50 megatons of TNT — roughly ten times the explosive force of every conventional bomb dropped in all of World War II combined. The fireball was visible hundreds of miles away, and the mushroom cloud climbed to around 40 miles high, several times the height of Mount Everest.
The bomb was so enormous that its carrier aircraft, a modified Tu-95, had to be stripped down to haul it; the crew were given roughly even odds of escaping the shockwave.
Designers had sketched a 100-megaton version, then deliberately halved it to limit the fallout.
The test was less a weapon than a message — a thunderclap of Cold War theater, too heavy and unwieldy to ever be a practical instrument of war.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
