Soviet “Tsar Bomba“ New Zemlya, USSR equal to about 58 megatons of TNT

The Tsar Bomba is the most powerful manufactured thermonuclear device in the history of mankind. Test results: The explosion of AN602, according to the classification of nuclear explosions, was an ultra-high power low air nuclear explosion. The results were impressive: • the flash was visible at a distance of over 1000 km, it was observed in Norway, Greenland and Alaska; • the nuclear mushroom of the explosion rose to a height of 67 kilometers, the shape of the “hat“ is two-tiered, the diameter of the upper tier is estimated at 95 kilometers, the lower tier - 70, the cloud was observed 800 km from the explosion site; • the blast wave circled the globe three times [1], the first time in 36 hours 27 minutes: • a seismic wave in the earth’s crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times; • the atmospheric pressure wave resulting from the explosion was recorded three times in New Zealand: the station in Wellington (New Zealand) registered an increase in pressure at 21:57 on October 30 (arrival of a wave from the northwest), at 07:17 on October 31 (from the southeast) and at 9:16 am on November 1 (from the northwest; GMT time) with amplitudes of 0.6, 0.4 and 0.2 millibars, respectively; the average wave speed is estimated at 303 m / s, or 9.9 degrees of the great circle per hour; • 780 km from the explosion in the village on about. Dixon shattered the glass in the windows; • the sound wave generated by the explosion reached Dikson Island at a distance of about 800 kilometers, but there are no reports of destruction or damage to structures even in the urban-type settlement of Amderma located much closer (280 km) to the landfill; • ionization of the atmosphere caused interference to radio communications even hundreds of kilometers from the landfill for about 40 minutes; • radioactive contamination of the experimental field with a radius of 2-3 km in the epicenter area was no more than 1 milliroentgen / hour, the testers appeared at the explosion site 2 hours later, the radioactive contamination posed practically no danger to the test participants. Consequences of the test The creation and testing of a superbomb was of great political importance: the Soviet Union demonstrated its potential in creating a nuclear arsenal of unlimited power (at that time, the most powerful thermonuclear charge tested by the United States was 15 Mt). It is curious that the United States did not increase the power of thermonuclear tests after the Soviet Union tested AN602, and in 1963, the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, Outer Space and Under Water was signed in Moscow. The scientific result of the test was the experimental verification of the principles of calculation and design of multistage thermonuclear charges. It was experimentally proved that there is no fundamental limitation on increasing the power of a thermonuclear charge (however, as early as October 30, 1949, three years before the Mike test, in the Supplement to the official report of the General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission, nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidore The Rabis noted that thermonuclear weapons have “unlimited destructive power“ and that the cost of increasing the yield of the ammunition in 1950 fiscal year prices was 60 cents per kiloton of TNT). In the tested specimen of the bomb, to raise the explosion power by another 50 megatons, it was enough to replace the lead shell with uranium-238, as was normally expected. The replacement of the cladding material and the decrease in the explosion power were caused by the desire to reduce the amount of radioactive fallout to an acceptable level, and not by the desire to reduce the weight of the bomb, as is sometimes believed (the weight of the AN602 really decreased from this, but only slightly - the uranium cladding should have weigh about 2800 kg, while the lead a shell of the same volume - based on the lower density of lead - about 1700 achieved relief of a little more than one ton is weakly noticeable with a total mass of AN602 of at least 24 tons (even if we take the most modest estimate) and did not affect the state of affairs with its transportation ... The explosion became one of the cleanest in the history of atmospheric nuclear testing in terms of power unit. In the first and second stages of the bomb, fissile substances (plutonium 239 and uranium 335) were used, which in itself provided a large amount of radioactive fallout, nevertheless, it can be considered that the AN602 was really relatively clean - more than 97% of the explosion power was given by practically no radioactive contamination reaction of thermonuclear fusion. A distant consequence was the increased radioactivity accumulated in the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya.