Here’s a rare video, previously classified but recently released, of the explosion of the “Tsar Bomba“, which the Soviet Union detonated on October 30, 1961. Wikipedia calls it “the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested”, and it “remains the most powerful human-made explosive ever detonated.”
How powerful was this H-bomb? About 50 megatons of TNT; here’s a comparison to other Big Bombs:
The Tsar Bomba was the single most physically powerful device ever deployed on Earth. For comparison, the largest weapon ever produced by the U.S., the now-decommissioned B41, had a predicted maximum yield of 25 megatons of TNT (100 PJ). The largest nuclear device ever tested by the U.S. (Castle Bravo) yielded 15 megatons of TNT (63 PJ) because of an unexpectedly high involvement of lithium-7 in the fusion reaction; the preliminary prediction for the yield was from 4 to 6 megatons of TNT (17 to…
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