This was originally presented as a two part article. Here in its entirety, the story of the biggest thermonuclear bomb in history.
In the throes of the Cold War, the US and the USSR engaged in a battle of “my nuclear dick is bigger than your nuclear dick.” Seemingly without end, it would continue until we unlocked some monster in the atom that hit whatever arbitrary size of destruction we deemed big enough.
In 1961, a Soviet bomb kissed the heavens in an explosion so massive that it drew the globe’s endlessly growing nuclear ambition to a close, at least for now.
Today’s Moment of Science… Tsar Bomba.
In the wake of World War II, old allies turned their ire on each other. Stalin was like “hey, Truman, remember that time we tagteamed those Nazi fucks with a combination of nukes and the Russian winter? Put our differences aside, eh?” Truman was like “Bruh, it’s all love. No, that’s not my ‘fuck the commies’ t-shirt.” Truman and Stalin had a list of reasons they didn’t really trust each other, some of them valid. But instead of going to couples therapy, the US threw down with the Truman Doctrine. TL;DR ‘‘fuck the commies, and if you’re on board with our ‘fuck the commies’ philosophy, we’re new besties.”
It’s not that either country had any real reason to drop bombs on a recent ally anytime soon. Both were, however, keen to win the thermonuclear dickwaving contest that was the Cold War.
Stalin beckoned his douchebag in chief, Lavrentiy Beria, to procure him a nuke. I’m sure Beria in no way threatened physicist Andrei Sakharov for his work. His first offering, a twenty-two kiloton nuke, was successfully tested at the Semipalatinsk site on August 29th, 1949.
Then Americans introduced the world to the thermonuclear bomb. Their strongest effort, Castle Bravo, was a 15 megaton terror measuring a thousand times bigger than each of the bombs dropped in WWII. The blast ripped a piece of the planet with it. A hundred miles from the explosion, people were like “is something burning? Is it me?” At which point, the US was like “yeah we’re out this is getting stupid.”
You know Stalin goddamn needed one now.
Beria went to the Sakharov and mentioned “America has H-Bombs. No pressure to make one ASAP, but get to it because I have a gun that I’m mentioning for no reason.”
By this time, Sakharov was having problems with the bomb. Not the science, the ethics. In testing his RDS-37, a 1.6 megaton nuke, a young girl forty miles away was killed when her building collapsed. A soldier was killed in the fallout. Hundreds were injured. Sakharov, who by now had been awarded both the Stalin Prize and the Hero of Socialist Labor for his work guiding the Soviet nuclear program, said “I could not escape a feeling of complicity.”
But even with Stalin dead (and Beria out), it was still the USSR, and it was still the Cold War.
On July 10, 1961, Khrushchev called Sakharov to Moscow, ordering him to science up world’s most massive fucking bomb ever to be ready to test in a mere four months. At least under Khrushchev people didn’t get shot into unmarked graves anymore. Allegedly.
The Sloika, or ‘layer cake’ design, was a nuclear bomb in which the neutrons released from fusion would fuel fission reactions, increasing the amount and rate of fission. It wasn’t without a few bumps in the road, but Sakharov was on the way to unlocking a new level of explosive power in the atom.
Sakharov, having witnessed that 1.6 megaton blast, worried this 100 megaton monstrosity would be too big, and swapped out uranium layers with lead to make the blast half as big. At least fifty megatons was less utterly fucking horrifying, but at that point, is it though?
They weren’t going to test their nukes in the Moscow suburbs, and the USSR was no stranger to the occasional crimes against humanity in their day.
Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago between the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, lands somewhere between ‘inhospitable to life’ and ‘is it possible to freeze a labia off?’ When Norway tried to make a claim on this hunk of tundra in the 1870s, Russia claimed it by sending indigenous Nenets from Siberia to live there (not exactly willingly). When the USSR felt like bombing the shit out of it in the 1950s they were like “thanks for keeping the place warm, don’t let the radioactive isotopes hit you on the way out.” Shockingly, property rights didn’t improve much from a tsar to Stalinism to Khrushchev.
On October 30th, 1961, a Tu-95 bomber piloted by Andrei Durnovtsev made its way over the drop site with the biggest piece of airborne nuclear fuckery known to man. Another aircraft was shadowing his path to film the explosion. Barometric sensors would trigger it at a set altitude. To give the pilot extra distance during the descent, a parachute weighing in at a ton was deployed from the bomb. Even so, Durnovtsev’s chances of survival were only put at about 50%.
Durnovtsev and the Tu-95 parted ways with the bomb at 11:30am, 10km above Novaya Zemlya. The phantom tumbled for a quiet minute before detonation.
This has been your evil little cliffhanger of a Moment of Science, because y’all seriously need to hear the rest of this and I thought I was going to be done writing four hours ago. We’ll be back tomorrow with part two.
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The Cold War nuclear ambitions of the US and USSR reached a fever pitch as each country developed thermonuclear weapons. After the US dropped their nastiest piece of work on Bikini Atoll, America’s search for the atom’s more ferocious dragons came to an end. At fifteen megatons, Castle Bravo packed a thousand times the damage of the beasts that split open on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s not clear what ‘big enough’ means when you’re measuring weapons that flatten cities, but the US found theirs.
The USSR had not. Yet.
Today’s sequel to yesterday’s Moment of Science… the fallout of Tsar Bomba.
Andrei Sakharov was a brilliant physicist who worked on the development of the USSR’s first nuclear bomb in the late 1940s. He then developed their first thermonuclear weapons, pushing Soviet bombs over the megaton threshold. Years of keeping his head down and blasting the shit out of some atoms led to receiving the highest of honors that could be bestowed upon a civilian for his suite of nuclear toys.
Sometimes referred to as ‘Sakharov’s third idea,’ RDS-37 was their first no-fucking-kidding thermonuclear bomb, a two-stage hydrogen bomb that broke the megaton barrier. It caused two fatalities and way too goddamn many injuries for “just” a test. Sakharov started to feel the weight of his work.
But this was the Cold War, and after Castle Bravo there was no option than to blow a bigger nuclear fart than the Americans. When Khrushchev asked for a bigger bomb, what was this winner of the Lenin Prize, the Stalin Prize, and the Hero of Socialist Labor going to do? Say “boss, let the Americans have this one” and live to tell the tale?
It’s impossible to know what went through Sakharov’s mind that moment in 1961 when Tsar Bomba, the culmination of his work as a nuclear scientist, detonated. A three-stage thermonuclear blast, it was supposed to be a hundred megatons. At the last minute they reduced the payload down to yield a fifty megaton blast because, well, we didn’t want to do anything dangerous now, did we?
The mushroom cloud damn near reached space.
The 60,000lb bomb transformed into fifty megatons of explosive force in mid-air, a shockwave hitting the ground with a force that caused a 5.5 earthquake. The blast wave from this fucker circled the earth three times. Durnovtsev, who piloted the plane that dropped the fireball, plummeted nearly a thousand meters before regaining control of the aircraft. The flash of light was seen a thousand miles away. Heat from the blast caused third degree burns a hundred kilometers away, and further down the road from that, wooden houses were reduced to kindling. Windows shattered as far away as Norway and Finland.
As I’ve said never before in my life, it was just too big.
There’s no practical use for that kind of weapon in any war, other than perhaps a cold one.
In the wake of Tsar Bomba, Andrei Sakharov took on a new life mission: to reform the usage and testing of nuclear weapons. The damage from these “safe” tests made him reconsider if safe testing on land was even possible. Sakharov had a great deal of influence in getting the USSR to sign the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It didn’t eliminate nuclear testing, but it was moved underground where the fallout wouldn’t scorch the Earth.
Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his activism, but was not allowed to leave the USSR to collect the award. Russia loves its dissidents kinda the way the internet loves nuance. They weren’t thrilled that their decorated nuclear physicist was shouting from the rooftops “this nuclear fuckery is bullshit, I say, fucking bullshit!” He compared the country to a cancer cell. He wrote letters on behalf of hundreds of prisoners. He worked with human rights organizations.
The KGB file on him referred to their former hero as “Domestic Enemy Number One.” By the 1980s, he faced harassment, imprisonment, exile from Moscow, and had not been allowed near his field of study for years.
Perestroika and glasnost were implemented under Gorbachev in 1986, leading the way for Sakharov’s exile to end. He was briefly elected to office before his death in 1989 at the age of 68 from cardiac complications. The world has not since seen a nuclear blast larger than the one he created and spent his last decades fighting.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, still kinda effing shocked at how much shit y’all did in the sixties. And lived.
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