The ‘Tsar Bomba’ Was a 50-Megaton Nuke

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-tsar-bomba-was-a-50-megaton-monster-nuke-6855dcaeb618

by vinnyglennon • 11 years ago

101 122 11 years ago

joezydeco• 11 years ago

Be sure to visit the NUKEMAP simulator and see how the Tsar Bomba matches up to some of the other nuclear warheads available. Drop one on your hometown!

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

Or the 3d version, which is a bit scary in combination with the 3d building imagery from aerial photography - for my house it's good enough that I can easily make out individual trash bins and features as small as a couple of square feet in my back garden. When you hit the detonate button you get to see the mushroom cloud as well as the blast radius :-/

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap3d/#

cge• 11 years ago

I've always thought it illustrative to compare the NUKEMAP results for Little Boy and the Tsar Bomba at Hiroshima. It gives a good indication of just how much more destructive and terrifying warheads became: where Little Boy destroyed a city, a 100 Mton Tsar Bomba would have destroyed much of the region, and caused fires on other islands. And for ICBMs, MIRVs meant that even smaller warheads, themselves still vastly larger than Little Boy, could be launched together to have the same or worse destructive effects.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure if the first atomic warheads had been 10 or even 100 times the size they still would have been used.

After all they could have dialed down 'Little Boy' (what a crap name for a weapon) to a smaller yield too, or dropped it in a less populated area but did not.

jokoon• 11 years ago

I wonder why, depending on the bomb, the radius some radius don't come in the same order. Some time the air blast is larger than the fireball, sometimes not.

maxerickson2• 11 years ago

One thing that factors into that is the surface vs airburst setting (the presets differ).

edit: for the simulation, the other major thing that factors into it must be the "fission fraction", the presets store 4 things: name, yield, a field marking surface/airburst and the fission fraction.

jacquesm4• 11 years ago

That's a function of the density of the material around the bomb at the time of the explosion.

kijin• 11 years ago

The fireball radius and air blast radius are probably proportional to different multiples and/or powers of the bomb's total energy.

For example, if A = 7x^2 and B = 2x^3, A will be larger than B when x is small, but B will overtake A as x grows beyond a certain point.

myrryr• 11 years ago

ok... here is the deal.... the Tsar Bomba was ^#%$ing huge.

No seriously... MUCH MUCH bigger then you think.

it was 10 times the combined power of all the conventional explosives used in World War II

it was 10% of the combined yield of all nuclear tests to date.

and mostly.... It was the equivalent of over 1kg of antimatter going up. 1 ^#%$ing kg.... of ^#%$ing antimatter.

It broke windows in Norway and Finland and its shock wave was VISIBLE in the air 700 km away.

It is impossible to get people to understand how much of a monster it was. AND.... and this was it dialed down to 1/2 its maximum yield.

No one has been crazy enough to test another nuke of its size. Even in the height of the cold war no one was crazy enough to test something like that again.

dijit2• 11 years ago

that's the part that boggles my mind.. it's as phenomenally big as everyone mentions, but it was only 50% yield because the Soviets were scared.

my head cannot fathom what 100% yield would look like.

jug2• 11 years ago

It would also have been far more terrible even in the 50% yield if it had been let to touch the ground for the energy to turn into seismic waves. The energy corresponded to a 8.1 on the Richter scale.

tim333• 11 years ago

The trouble with the 100% yield version that was originally planned is it would have dumped a lot of radioactive fallout on Russia. The 50% version was not so much dialled back as a different design with some of the uranium components replaced with lead.

trhway• 11 years ago

No one has been crazy enough to test another nuke of its size. Even in the height of the cold war no one was crazy enough to test something like that again.

and thanks to the test we know for sure that ignition of the atmosphere with even such a bomb still wouldn't happen :)

Xophmeister• 11 years ago

Whenever the Tsar Bomba comes up, the potential for it to have ignited the atmosphere is always brought up. What exactly, however, does that mean? (Apologies if that sounds sarcastic; it's a genuine question!)

My guess is that the heat/EM could induce a state change in atmospheric gasses into plasma. Would this be a chain reaction that ultimately encircles the world? Also, what are the implications of that (locally or globally)?...

jug2• 11 years ago

When nukes stop being about the M.A.D. concept and more about being a propaganda tool... It was designed to shock. And it surely did. Soon after the detonation, Andrei Sakharov himself (behind the Soviet "Third Idea" nuclear weapon design) began speaking out against nuclear weapons and became a Soviet dissident.

yarper• 11 years ago

It's not crazy. It's pretty horrifyingly logical. Why have one 100Mt nuke, when you can have a hundred 1Mt nukes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetab...

pcarmichael• 11 years ago

Here are a couple videos of MIRV re-entry tests - basically what it'd look like before having a really bad day. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1dDTnszCQC0 http://theaviationist.com/2013/12/27/russia-icbm-test-kura/

angdis• 11 years ago

Indeed. I can confirm that after having played Missle Command on the Atari 800 in 1983!

tomjen32• 11 years ago

If you want to see the effects of various nukes there is a simulator here: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ (I have no idea if it will get you on some sort of list if you access it).

The takeaway is that, as long as it is just a single nuke, the damages are rather underwelming, except for the Tsar bomba.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

Those rings show the area of near total destruction and death.

The area of severe damage and less instant fatality is maybe twice as wide.

Outside of that there's another ring of significant damage, but the probability of survival increases (as long as you're not near a window when the shockwave hits.)

The map also doesn't show fall out or the effects of a possible firestorms.

arethuza4• 11 years ago

"the damages are rather underwelming"

Not sure I would agree with that - a single 800kt detonation over Manhattan looks pretty bad to me and a realistic attack would probably have had many tens of warheads used.

Here is a rather jolly 1980's BBC documentary that spends a lot of time looking at the effects of a single 1Mt warhead on London:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vejorfkdgwU

Of course, it does finish by noting that a real attack would have multiple ground and air bursts.

[NB UK("pretty bad") == NonUK("utterly appalling")]

mikeash2• 11 years ago

One missing piece to the puzzle from that page is accuracy and hardened targets.

These days you can just about crush an individual ant with a missile fired from the other side of the planet, but it wasn't always like that. Accuracy used to be much worse, especially on the Soviet side. At the time the Tsar Bomba was developed, you might be lucky to get your bomb within a mile or two of your target. Even bombers were frequently way off target.

Then consider that a lot of the targets are hardened military targets, not cities. Destroying cities was always either incidental (they contained or were near military/political targets) or a last resort (convince the enemy not to attack by threatening his population in retaliation). Primary targets were (still are!) things like airbases, missile silos, and command centers. Many of these are hardened targets. A more normal-sized nuke going off a mile or two away from the intended ground zero will still wreck a city, but a missile silo can take it. If you want to be sure of getting targets like that, you either need to be a lot more accurate or you need much more powerful bombs. Accuracy wasn't possible at the time, thus huge bombs.

If you look at the evolution of nuclear arsenals, it was a race to bigger and bigger bombs until sometime in the 60s, at which point accuracy started improving greatly and the bombs got smaller again. For example, the US fielded lots of 9 megaton bombs in the 60s, but now the typical weapon in the US arsenal is under one megaton.

grkvlt2• 11 years ago

I have no idea if it will get you on some sort of list if you access it

I guess it will get you on a list of nuclear history enthusiasts. Apart from that, this sort of thinking is really just mild paranoia. While I recognise that the NSA monitoring is a big deal, I don't think that it can be extended to mean that ordinary people accessing sites like this will become targets.

So, don't worry, and go ahead and access the site, and also read the guy's blog - it's very interesting.

jseliger• 11 years ago

The takeaway is that, as long as it is just a single nuke, the damages are rather underwelming

No—no it's not. See "What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?" (http://thebulletin.org/what-would-happen-if-800-kiloton-nucl...). Notice this:

No survivors. Within tens of minutes, everything within approximately five to seven miles of Midtown Manhattan would be engulfed by a gigantic firestorm

Furthermore:

The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else. Tens of miles downwind of the area of immediate destruction, radioactive fallout would begin to arrive within a few hours of the detonation.

Manhattan has a daytime population of more than two million people.

cma• 11 years ago

Not when you set it to ground burst and look at the fallout. A nuke in Florida can leave fallout up the entire east coast.

matthewmcg2• 11 years ago

Not just crazy--there was no military utility for a bomb that large, even in the twisted logic of cold war doomsday planning.

gshubert17• 11 years ago

A 1-Megaton explosion has the same energy as 46.55 grams of matter. 50-Megatons is thus about 2.32 kilograms, or 1.16 kg each of matter and anti-matter.

A kilton of TNT is said [0] to be equivalent to a cube 27.8 feet on a side. 50-Megatons would be a cube over 1000 feet on a side.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent

adventured• 11 years ago

Tsar's destructive force was incredible, but I think it bothers me a lot more that the US built 500 B41 bombs with a 25Mt yield during that era. What's the functional destructive difference between 50Mt and 25Mt? Zilch, any practical target hit by it is gone.

Synaesthesia• 11 years ago

It's incredibly bothersome. We still have the ability to annihilate the whole human race, instantly,

afsina• 11 years ago

I think it is not possible to eradicate all human race with current nuclear bombs. Some would survive.

refurb• 11 years ago

What's the alternative?

jkot• 11 years ago

It was different time.

Soviet union was enclosed by US airbases and nonstop flying bombers, which could hit any city in a few hours. America also developed crazy stuff like Project Pluto...

Anyway there are two reasons for this bomb not mentioned in article:

- Terraforming. Soviets honestly believed they could redirect rivers from north to arid south. They even made artificial valley in mountains as experiment. Larger nukes are cleaner than smaller nukes.

- Doomsday device in form of dirt bomb. Plan was to concentrate all nuclear waste from Soviet countries on single place, and explode massive bomb under it. Explosion would spread nuclear material into atmosphere and most of earth wold become radioactive. This device was not approved by soviet leaders, too dangerous.

dijit2• 11 years ago

I think that Russia is still surrounded by US forces, or at least US sympathetic forces.

I wonder if this causes their country-people to feel boxed in or cornered. :\

speeder4• 11 years ago

Yes, it does.

And might be the reason why they are so quick to also help other countries with a similar issue (for example: I am from Brazil, and our navy is crap, when we announced finding one of the largest oil reserves of the world, US immediately announced reactivating their south-atlantic fleet, they don't even tried to hide their intentions... so Russia now patrols our water for us, to keep US ships away from the oil rigs).

chucksmash• 11 years ago

There are some good articles that go into a bit more depth on this, specifically on Putin's perceptions of such (or at least his rhetoric to that effect). Here's one from the Jan 31 Economist:

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21641278-russian-presid...

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

Pretty much. And it is not a recent thing.

JackFr• 11 years ago

On the surface of a sphere you can declare yourself on the 'outside', and thus rather than being surrounded, you are now surrounding FTW.

stygiansonic• 11 years ago

If you enjoyed this article, the documentary "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie" was great - decent footage and a great soundtrack.

dominotw2• 11 years ago

There is one on youtube also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYUP7zJ0CwU

matthewmcg2• 11 years ago

The filmmaker behind TAB is Peter Kuran. He was a visual effects specialist for some pretty cool movies (e.g. Empire Strikes Back). Restoring old atomic test footage is a special interest of his and he's also done several more in-depth documentaries about atomic weapons:

Nuclear Rescue 911: Broken Arrows & Incidents

Atomic Filmmakers: Behind the Scenes

Atomic Journeys: Welcome to Ground Zero

Nukes in Space

Atomic Filmmakers is my favorite--it's sort of a "making of" for the historical footage used in the other movies and it talks about the secret Lookout Mountain film studio the Air Force set up outside LA to develop special technology to document and instrument above-ground nuclear tests.

codeshaman• 11 years ago

When I think about human intelligence, my mind always arrives at these scientists.

How can, then, some of the smartest people on Earth be involved in something as stupid as this.

Many scientists realise the grave consequences of their stupidity, after the fact. Both Sakharov and Oppenheimer realised this, but it was too late. The genie was out.

The mirage of power, respect, titles, prizes and access to unlimited resources for their experiments is too strong to resist, I guess. :Carrot

Then there's the patriotism thing - do right for you country, protect it from the enemies. Fear. :Stick

This is how the devil works, after all :).

Beware of the stupid as he knows not what the implications of his activities are. Be scared of the smart working for the stupid, as he very well knows the implications, but is too weak to resist the temptation. He has sold his soul.

dominotw2• 11 years ago

It is not as simple as that . Watch this documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYUP7zJ0CwU

mikeash2• 11 years ago

It's your classic Prisoners' Dilemma. (No surprise, since game theory was largely developed to analyze nuclear war.)

You're stuck with another guy. You're both better off if you both cooperate. But individually you're better off if you betray the other guy. In that situation it's really, really hard to arrange cooperation.

The US and USSR would have been better off if they could have put a halt to the madness. But if one stopped, that gives huge incentives for the other to betray.

The thing is, betraying the other is the rational thing to do. It's the worst outcome, but it comes from purely rational actions.

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

And hilariously, whenever it is tested the whole thing falls flat. Because humans cooperate by instinct. Kennedy was told again and again to escalate until the Kremlin backed down. Eventually he had enough and basically showed "rationality" the door. Thus the Cuban Crisis ended without the cold war going hot.

MrZongle2• 11 years ago

How can, then, some of the smartest people on Earth be involved in something as stupid as this.

Isn't that what is happening now, with some of the bright people who work at the NSA?

RexRollman2• 11 years ago

Intelligence does not equal wisdom.

IkmoIkmo• 11 years ago

Well consider the following question, is it crazy to call Nuclear Weapons one of the biggest peace-keeping phenomena of all time?

It appears that because of MAD, sovereignty between Nuclear armed countries is pretty much ensured.

I mean I'm scared to death by Nuclear weapons (intellectually scared, similar to say Global Warming being a gigantic threat), but I can't help but wonder if these things don't prevent a WW3, and force conflicts to be resolved diplomatically, through economic sanctions, cyberwar, through export of ideology or comparatively smaller 'cold war' type conflicts.

e.g. Yemen today is essentially Iran fighting Saudi Arabia for a bit of regional influence in a way without Iran & ally Russia/China actually fighting with Saudi & ally US/West. Conflicts that are all preferable in scale to an all out WW3, which wouldn't happen (on paper) because of MAD due to Nuclear Weapons.

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

The question is, what are the fighting for.

Nukes makes zero sense if it is a resource war, and those are the oldest ones there is.

A influence war also has little use for nukes, as you want those friendly to you to live and thrive afterwards.

As best i can tell the only time using nukes "make sense" is when faced with a enemy that is committed to your total elimination, and that are completely unified in this goal.

garethrees• 11 years ago

The Tsar Bomba was an experimental weapon, but the United States had the B41, a three-stage thermonuclear weapon with a yield of 25 megatons. Four of these would have been as powerful as the Tsar Bomba; the U.S. manufactured 500 of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb

In the 1960s the U.S. Strategic Air Command ran a continuous airborne nuclear-armed patrol (Operation Chrome Dome), so there was probably a 25 megaton weapon in the air for much of that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome

It's also worth remembering that the limiting factor on the yield of the Tsar Bomba was the carrying capability of the Tu-95. The Teller–Ulam design for thermonuclear weapons is scalable: you can keep adding stages as long as you have the uranium, plutonium and lithium to make them with. Edward Teller supposedly designed (or at least contemplated) a 10 gigaton bomb: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-big...

paganel• 11 years ago

Edward Teller supposedly designed (or at least contemplated) a 10 gigaton bomb

That guy was batshit crazy, pardon my French. I know that the Dr. Strangelove character was pretty much based on him, I know about and I partially understand the reasons behind the nuclear arms race, but when you read about plans like this you just start contemplating about the end of humans as a species.

drzaiusapelord4• 11 years ago

How is he crazy? When nukes are on the table either you implement a MAD-like policy or you die in nuclear fire. There's no real middle ground with weapons this powerful. Its rational to support MAD. Thus far, its working. A lot of human warfare is on its face is crazy sounding, but has a rational backing.

when you read about plans like this you just start contemplating about the end of humans as a species.

We called up the USSR and asked them to stop producing weapons on that scale. They laughed in our face. What exactly do you propose? Heck, the USSR's client states were motivated to nuke us without warning. Castro had a pretty big hard-on for launching nukes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22nuke.html?_r=0

He wasn't convinced by the loss of life or anything. His Moscow handlers had to explain to him that the radioactive cloud would be bad for Cubans. Heck, the politburo was demanding WWIII from Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis.

Today, Russia maintains an openly published first strike policy on what it calles "tactical nukes." Essentially they say they can launch nukes whenever they feel like it and not consider it a MAD violation. So if Putin's conventional troops are losing, he just nukes the opposition. With madmen like Putin running nukes, MAD makes sense. Its the only thing that does.

wdr1• 11 years ago

That guy was batshit crazy, pardon my French.

Pretty weak to call a brilliant man "batshit crazy" simply because his politics differ from your politics.

avmich• 11 years ago

I think Teller was discussing at least once big bombs as a countermeasure against falling asteroid/comet threat. I guess you might actually need a gigaton bomb in a case like that?

golemotron• 11 years ago

I saw a doc about nuclear weapons that mentioned this one and said that the real reason that no one made them bigger was the fact that they were wasteful.

The atmosphere is effectively 10 miles high. Once your blast radius approaches that the difference in pressure pushes most of the energy upward above the atmosphere. You don't get the horizontal spread you'd expect as you increase tonnage.

hga• 11 years ago

There's also a re-radiation effect, where the ground etc. that was heated up by the bomb radiates part of that energy into space.

RexRollman2• 11 years ago

"Interestingly enough, Tsar Bomba was one of the “cleanest” nuclear weapons ever detonated, because the bomb’s design eliminated 97 percent of the possible fallout."

How do one design a bomb to eliminate, or minimize, fallout? I wasn't even aware it was an option.

korethr• 11 years ago

By my understanding, fallout is less a function of the explosion being nuclear and more of how the bomb is detonated. The Tsar Bomba was an air-burst. By keeping the fireball in the air, less vaporized material from the ground is kicked up into the debris cloud from the blast. Both air bursts and ground bursts generate fallout, but a ground burst will generate nastier, localized fallout, and more of it.

This is my speculation, but I suspect another reason for the relative lack of fallout from the Tsar Bomba was related to its yeild. To get a particularly large yeild from the materials available, the bomb is going to have to be as efficient as you can get it. All things equal, a more efficient system generates less waste.

Or the design the article could simply be referring the bomb's parachute system, which helped keep the blast in the air.

arethuza4• 11 years ago

Most of the energy in most H-bomb designs comes from the fission of the uranium tamper around the secondary by neutrons from the fusion of the secondary. Fission is a messy process.

In the "limited" Tsar bomb design they had a non-fissioning secondary tamper so yield was mostly from fusion and the explosion was high enough (i.e. far from the ground or sea) that the fusion neutrons didn't have too much else to activate.

jostylr• 11 years ago

I found the recent series by the Digital Antiquarian to be very interesting on this, weaving together Infocom's Trinity series and the atomic bomb history, including the Tsar Bomba.

http://www.filfre.net/2015/01/t-plus-3-edward-teller-and-his...

The ‘Tsar Bomba’ Was a 50-Megaton Nuke

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