The Bomb That Dwarfed the Sun

Looks like it’s almost time for the end of the world, again, everybody.

Leaders of most enrichment capable countries may be blowing hollow talk – and pointing fingers – over how they’re making good on stockpile disarmament efforts, and of how pleasant and verdant the coming nuke-free world will be because right now, in this precarious moment, they’ve decided to step up, once and for all, and end the silly, awful game.

But the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is calling bullshit. The Bulletin, a periodical whose member scientists have been adjusting a symbolic Doomsday Clock since 1947, has just moved their grim timepiece one minute closer to nuclear midnight. We’re just five minutes out, now, people. Maybe now is a good time to tap your inner Grey Man survivalist.

Don’t bum too hard, though. It’s been much, much worse. Beginning 1953, when the U.S. tested its first hydrogen bomb, and on through the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the BAS’ minute hand hovered even closer to annihilation time. Russia’s Tsar Bomba, a three-stage hydrogen bomb equivalent to 50-megatons of TNT and variously known as RDS-220, code-name Vanya, Kuzkina Mat’ (rough translation: “We’ll show you!”), Big Ivan, and Project 7000, is the Cold War’s flash par excellence. Dropped October 30, 1961, onto a remote Arctic Ocean archipelago, Tsar Bomba remains the most powerful nuclear bomb ever discharged.

Before I hopelessly try and recreate the absolutely crushing apocalyptic shockwaves this thing sent out, check out these specs. Tsar Bomba itself was eight meters in length, two meters in diameter, and weighed in at 27 tonnes – so massive that just to pack the brute into an already highly modified release plane (painted reflective white to ward off heat damage) technicians had to rip off the plane’s doors and fuselage fuel kegs. Knowing full well the weapon would incinerate everything in a sprawling death ring, the technicians even fashioned it with an 800-kilogram parachute so as to maybe give the pilots of both the release and observation craft enough time to scuttle at least 45 kilometers out from ground zero. Even still, the ensuing shockwave gained the release plane, dropping it a full kilometer and nearly killing its pilot.

Tsar Bomba’s fireball (top image) could be seen 1,000 kilometers from ground zero. Its mushroom cloud peaked at somewhere around 64 kilometers, the equivalent of about eight Mt. Everest’s stacked one atop the other. All buildings in Severny, the closest village located 55 kilometers from ground zero, were totally pulverized. The heat was ferocious enough to cause third-degree burns up to 100 kilometers from ground zero. Windows as far away as Finland and Norway shattered. Seismic sensors were still picking up the detonation’s shocks even after they’d already circled the earth twice.

And even better (worse?) yet, Russia initially planned for a punch equivalent of 100 megatons of TNT, but decided to halve that figure after realizing that fallout is a real drag. Still, 50 megatons. It’s difficult to wrap your brain around, to say nothing of Russia’s Dead Hand, a fail-deadly Doomsday trigger that may still be functional.

For representation’s sake, you’d have to stuff a 312-meter-per-side box (that’s about the height of the Eiffel Tower) full of TNT to get something comparable to Tsar Bomba. Think of it this way: that’s 1,400 times the combined fury of the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki; or 25 percent of the estimated yield of the 1883 volcanic blast of Krakatoa; or 10 times the total explosive wrath of all of WWII.

Or, think of it on a cosmic scale. Judged by per-unit volume, Tsar Bomba was trillions of times more forceful compared to the materials stewing in the fusion core of the sun, or about 25 percent of that star’s radius. You’d have to wait around 10 million years for the sun’s core to churn up the same amount of energy that emanated from Tsar Bomba’s casing, portions of which are preserved at the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum.

Seriously, how is there even still a planet left for us to bicker about not blowing up? How is there a clock left ticking?

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson