What Was the Biggest Nuclear Weapon Ever Built?

a routine nuclear test. Attached to the underside of the plane was a thermonuclear bomb that was so big it wouldn't fit inside the normal interior bomb bay. The cylindrical device was twenty six ft that's eight meters long and weighed nearly sixty thousand pounds or twenty seven metric tons.

The device had the prosaic official name of Item six O two, but it's gone down in history with the nickname of the Czar Bomba, the Russian way of calling it the Emperor of bombs, and that name was no exaggeration.

Czar bomba's yield is estimated to have been roughly fifty seven megatons, about thirty eight hundred times the power of the fifteen kiloton atomic bomb that the US used to destroy Hiroshima in on that day in nineteen sixty one, Czar Bombo was released on a parachute in order to slow its descent and give the bomber and its crew

a chance to escape. When the giant bomb finally detonated about thirteen thousand feet or four kilometers over its target, the blast was so powerful that it destroyed everything within a nearly twenty two mile or thirty five kilometer radius and generated a mushroom cloud that towered nearly two hundred thousand feet or sixty kilometers high. In Soviet towns a hundred miles or a hundred and sixty kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, and even brick and stone structures

suffered damage. After being largely forgotten for many years, Zar Bombo was back in the news in August when the shan State Nuclear Power Company posted on YouTube a vintage film that showed an aerial view of the explosion and the towering cloud it created. One of the cameramen who recorded the event described the bomb as creating quote, a powerful white flash over the horizon, and after a long period of time, he heard a remote, indistinct and heavy

blow as if the Earth had been killed. The blast was so powerful that its shock wave caused the tin to immediately drop three thousand feet or a kilometer in altitude, though the pilot regained control and got the plane back to its base safely. So why did the Soviets want such a humongous bomb? Czar Bomba's test was symbolic of escalating tensions between the Soviets and the United States. After a June nine summit in Vienna between Soviet leader Nikita

Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy went badly. Kruschev apparently decided to take out his frustrations by showing off Soviet military progress, including ending the informal moratorium on nuclear testing that both countries had maintained since the late nineteen fifties. The resumption of testing gave Soviet weapons researchers a chance to try out an idea that they had had for building a giant H bomb, one that was far bigger than the most powerful weapon in the U s Arsenal

and the frightening logic of all out nuclear war. Having a high yield H bomb did make some sense theoretically at the time, missiles capable of striking distant countries were still in their infancy, and the Soviet Union didn't have many strategic bombers. The US, in contrast, had a variety of aircraft that could strike from bases conveniently close to

Soviet territory. We spoke by email with Nikolai Sakov, a Vienna based senior fellow affiliated with the James Martin Center for Non Proliferation Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California. He said, hence, if you can deliver only one, two or three bombs, they better be very powerful. But the Soviet researchers pushed that idea to

an extreme. Originally they envisioned a one hundred megaton weapon with a high level of radiation, but settled for one of slightly more than half that much explosive power after the USSRS political leadership expressed worries about contamination from such a blast, Sokov said, as a result, fallout was very limited, much more limited than one could expect. The shock wave

was really strong, however, its circumnavigated Earth three times. Even so, Japanese authorities found the highest level of radiation and rain water that they had ever detected and a quote invisible cloud of radioactive ash that drifted eastward across the Pacific and then crossed Canada and the Great Lakes region of the US, but US scientists reassured the public that most of the debris from the Czar BOMBA would stay high in the stratosphere and gradually lose its radioactivity by the

time it fell to earth. The Soviets informed the US forehand of their intention to test a fifty megaton nuclear bomb. In a speech just a week before the blast, The U s Deputy Secretary of Defense suggested that the bomb wasn't intended to intimidate the US, but to send a message to the Soviet Union's restless ally China. Whatever the case, although the Czar BOMBA made headlines in the US, government, officials weren't that impressed by the nightmarish display of nuclear destruction.

The US had concentric rings of defenses, from early warning radar to fighter aircraft, and surface to air missiles that all would have made it difficult for a Soviet bomber to succeed in a first strike, and a device as massive as the Tzar BOMBA was dangerous to the aircraft that dropped it, so much so that the t U crew had been given only a fifty fifty chance of survival. But we also spoke via email with Robert Standish Norris, a senior fellow for Nuclear policy at the Federation of

American Scientists. He said that the US quote looked in the big bomb option and decided no. He explained that theoretically, quote, there is no limit on how big a hydrogen bomb can be. If ever used, zar BOMBA would clearly kill a lot more people. Accuracy became an option, and if you improve it by half, then you can cut the yield by a factor of eight. This is what we did, and the Soviets followed. We also checked in with Pavel

Podvig via email. He's a long time nuclear weapons analyst who has worked with the United Nations and National Security Studies programs at Princeton and Stanford Universities, and operates the website Russian forces dot org. He said, everybody understood that it's too big to be a practical weapon. From the point of view of destructive power. It's even more efficient to use several smaller weapons than one large one. Zara BOMBA ended up being a Maccab curiosity of the nuclear age,

Podvig said no additional devices of this kind were built. Instead, the US SAR went in a different direction. A few years after the Czar bomba test, Soviet missile designers achieved a major breakthrough with liquid fuel, opening the way to produce strategic missiles that could be kept ready for launch

for extended periods and hidden in protected silos. Sokov explained, about nineteen sixty four to nineteen sixty five, the Soviet Union decisively turned toward an emphasis on intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can carry several warheads, each of which will strike a different target, which typically amounted to about sixty six of its strategic force until about the mid nineteen nineties, when it declined to roughly fift By the nineteen seventies,

only five percent of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was in the form of bombs that could be dropped by aircraft. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kaiger and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit House to works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. Four more pie cast my Heart Radio. Visit the i Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H