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Tsar Bomba

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Tsar Bomba casing on display at Arzamas-16

Tsar Bomba (Russian: Царь-бомба, literally "Tsar of the bombs"), developed by the Soviet Union, is the largest nuclear explosive ever detonated, and the most powerful of such ever employed by humans. It was tested on October 30, 1961 over the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Sea. There is no clear evidence that any examples other than the one tested were ever made.

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Origins

The Tsar Bomba was too large to fit entirely within the bomb bay of the Tu-95, the largest Soviet bomber of the day.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev initiated the project on July 10, 1961, requesting that the test take place in late October, while the 22nd Congress of the CPSU was in session. This 15 week deadline was met because the needed nuclear components were all off-the-shelf.

The nickname "Tsar Bomba" harkens back to the historical Russian practice of building impractically large things as shows of power or prowess, e.g., a massive bell (Tsar Kolokol), the world's largest cannon (Tsar Pushka), and the unwieldy Tsar Tank.

Nicknamed "Ivan" during its development, the Tsar Bomba was not intended for use in warfare, but was primarily an instance of the Cold war-era saber-rattling indulged in by the USSR and the USA. Krushchev gave the go-ahead at a time of grave tension: the first Berlin wall was erected in August 1961. The USSR had also unilaterally just ended a 3-year moratorium on atmospheric testing, and was about to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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Design

The large parachute retarded the fall so as to give the Tu-95 enough time to get out of range of the fireball.

The Tsar Bomba was a multi-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons. The initial three-stage (fission-fusion-fission) design was capable of approximately 100 Mt, but at a cost of much radioactive fallout. To limit this fallout, the third stage, consisting of a uranium fission tamper (which greatly amplifies the reaction) was replaced with one made of lead. This eliminated fast fission by the fusion-stage neutrons, so that approximately 97% of the total energy resulted from the fusion stage alone. This limited the yield to 50 Mt but greatly reduced the fallout from the test, as most of the fallout from a thermonuclear detonation results not from fusion but from the fission trigger. There was a strong incentive for this design feature; most of the fallout from a test of the Bomba would fall on Soviet territory.

The components were designed by a team of physicists, headed by Academician Julii Borisovich Khariton, which included Andrei Sakharov, Victor Adamsky, Yuri Babayev, Yuri Smirnov, and Yuri Trutnev. Shortly after the Tsar Bomba was detonated, Sakharov began speaking out against nuclear weapons, which culminated in his becoming a full-blown dissident (see his Memoirs).

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The test

The Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud rose as high as 64 km (40 mi) above the ground.

The Tsar Bomba was flown to its test site by a specially modified Tu-95 release plane which took off from an airfield in the Kola peninsula, flown by Major Andrei E. Durnotsev. The release plane was accompanied by a Tu-16 observer plane which took air samples and filmed the test; hence the movie stills that illustrate this and other articles about the test. Both aircraft were painted with a special reflective white paint to limit the heat damage from the test.

The bomb, weighing 27 tonnes, was so large (8 metres long by 2 metres in diameter) that the Tu-95 had to have its bomb bay doors removed. The bomb was attached to an 800 kg fall retardation parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km from ground zero. Failing such retardation, the bomb would have either reached its planned detonation altitude soon enough to turn the test into a suicide mission, or crashed into the ground at high speed, with unpredictable results. The USA has fitted a few of its nuclear bombs with parachute retardation for the same reason. A possibly apocryphal story has it that the fabrication of this parachute required so much raw nylon that the negligible Soviet nylon hosiery industry was noticeably disrupted.

The Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32 a.m., over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range, north of the Arctic Circle on Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea. The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 10,500 metres, and designed to detonate at a height of 4,000 m over the land surface (4,200 m over sea level) by barometric sensors.

The original USA estimate of the yield was 57 Mt, but since 1991 all Russian sources have stated its yield as "only" 50 Mt. Khrushchev's speeches claimed a yield of 100 Mt. The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen 1,000 km away. The heat could have caused third degree burns at a distance of 100 km. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 60 km high and 30-40 km wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, even breaking windows there. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 km away. The seismic shock of the test went around the Earth three times.

The Tsar Bomba is the most powerful explosive device ever constructed by humans, and its test is the largest detonation ever. Since 50 Mt is 2.1×10¹⁷ joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 3.9×10^-8 seconds or 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.3×10²⁴ watts or 5.3 yottawatts. This constitutes over 1% of the power output of the Sun (383 yottawatts) over the same time interval. By contrast, the largest weapon ever produced by the United States, the now-decommissioned B41, had a predicted maximum yield of 25 Mt, and the largest nuclear device ever tested by the USA (Castle Bravo) yielded 15 Mt.

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Analysis

The weight and size of the Tsar Bomba limited the range and speed of the specially modified bomber carrying it, and ruled out its being delivered by ICBM. Much of its high yield was inefficiently radiated upwards into space. Most of all, it suffered from serious blowback. It has been estimated that detonating the original 100 Mt design would have released fallout amounting to about 25% of all fallout emitted since the invention of nuclear weapons, resulting in lethal levels of radioactivity over an enormous area. Employing the 100 Mt version against a European power would have seriously harmed the Warsaw Pact nations and the European part of the USSR. Hence the Tsar Bomba was an impractically powerful weapon.

The Tsar Bomba was the culmination of a series of very high yield thermonuclear weapons designed by the USA (e.g., the Mark-17 [1] (http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/mk17.htm) and B41) and USSR during the 1950s. Such bombs were designed because:

The nuclear bombs of the day were large and heavy, regardless of yield, and could only be delivered by strategic bombers. Hence yield was subject to dramatic economies of scale;
It was feared that many if not most bombers would fail to reach their targets, because their size facilitated detection and their slowness facilitated interception. Hence maximizing the firepower carried by any single bomber was the order of the day;
Absent satellite intelligence, each side lacked precise knowledge of the location of the other side's military and industrial facilities;
A bomb dropped without benefit of Global positioning systems (GPS) could easily miss its intended target by 5 km or more. Parachute retardation only exacerbated this inaccuracy.

Thus certain bombs were designed to wipe out an entire large city even if dropped 5-10 km from its center. This objective meant that yield and effectiveness were positively correlated, at least up to a point. The advent of ICBMs accurate to 500 m or better, laser-guided bombs, and of GPS made such weapons obsolete. Nuclear weapon design in the 1960s and 1970s focused primarily on increased accuracy, miniaturization, and safety. Standard practice for a number of years has been to employ multiple smaller warheads (e.g., MIRVs) to "carpet" an area. This is believed to result in greater ground damage.

There exists a tradition in Russia of making huge things just for the sake of it and for the show. These are usually named Tsar.

Tsar Bell | Tsar Cannon | Tsar Bomb | Tsar Tank

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References

Film from a Soviet documentary about the bomb is featured in Peter Kuran, Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie (Visual Concept Entertainment, 1996).[2] (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/VCE.html)

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