Big Ass Post for a Big Ass Bomb

The biggest bomb ever detonated, in fact. Tsar Bomba. The design allowed for a 100 MT blast but it was scaled down to *only* produce 50 MT to avoid too many problems from the fallout. 50 MT. M as in Mega. Little Boy, the first atomic bomb dropped in an act of warfare, detonated with a 15 kt yield. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had a 21 kt yield. Tsar Bomba was over 2500 times more powerful of an explosion than either of those. and it could've been double that, 5000 times larger, had the Russians figured out a safe way to detonate it!!

To give the Soviets some credit, they decided not to build the 100 MT version because of the serious health hazards a detonation of that size would've posed to the northern areas of the USSR. The resulting mushroom cloud being 64 km high, about 1/5 of the way to where the International Space Station orbits (330), would lead you to believe it would have immense fallout repercussions, I'll get into this later on.

The weapon itself weighs 27 tons, they had to strip just about everything they could from the plane they dropped it from, a Tu-95, including extra fuel tanks and the bomb bay doors. This is the Tu-95,

 which for reference, is about 2 times the size of a Boeing 737:

So, basically you've got this big plane carrying a big bomb which is going to make a big explosion. But, lot of people forget that you've gotta watch out that the bomb you drop doesn't have an explosion so large that your bombing run becomes a suicide run. To prevent this, they attached parachutes to the bomb so it fell slower and gave the pilots 45 extra seconds to gtfo. The bomb detonated 4 km off the ground, about 6.5 miles high, but the actual fireball never touched the ground, the shock wave was so immense that it kept if from actually reaching the ground. This shock wave was so large, it circled the earth at least 3 times before dissipating.

Onto the fallout aspect since that's what triggered this and last post in relation to atmospheric radioisotope dispersion. Like I already said, the bomb was supposed to be 100 MT but to modify it to 50 MT, the Soviets put a lead shield around the third and (people think) the second stage to cut down on fast fission of the U-238 there. That's right, I said third stage, as in the bomb had 3 stages.

If you aren't familiar with how thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs work, here's a quick update(I'll probably be on some government watch list for a while after this). Like a regular bomb, nuclear weapons work by putting as much energy as you can in as small a space as you can until it is all released at once. Nuclear fission, things splitting apart, releases a lot of energy if done right. That's how nuclear power works; split uranium-235 apart, use the heat to boil water to steam, use steam to turn turbine and make electricity flow. Little Boy and Fat Man were fission type bombs. Make an assembly that isn't critical but can be made to go supercritical somehow and then hold it together as the energy builds until it blows itself apart. Very dirty. They typically blow apart before they're burned up all the nasty stuff thus spreading the radioactive junk everywhere. Most hydrogen bombs have 2 stages, fission and fusion. Fusion is combining atoms for WAY more energy, but also harder to achieve. Hydrogen bombs use a fission explosion to create a fusion explosion, the "smaller" fission explosion pushes the fusion part together so hard that the atoms combine and release WAY more energy. This explains why Little Boy and Fat Man only had 15-20 kT yield but shortly after the US was detonating 10 MT bombs fairly easily. So, little explosion causes big explosion. For Tsar Bomba, there was a third, bigger explosion set off by the second big fusion explosion, another fusion assembly ready to be pushed together and go boom.

Back to why fusion bombs are cleaner. Most bombs are made in a uranium-238 container both to shield the users and contain the explosions. Like I said, fission blows itself apart before it burns up and spreads its nastiness. Fusion bombs, however, burn up much faster and thus are able to burn up a lot of the nasty before it is physically able to be propelled apart. Tsar Bomba is reported as "the "cleanest" weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions. The effect of this bomb at full yield [100 MT] on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%."

Since even the Russians didn't want to irradiate the entire world, they put in place lead shields around the second an third stages to stop fast neutrons from interacting with the uranium-238. According to nuclearweaponstests.org, "This reduced the yield by 50% and eliminated 97% of the fallout (1.5 megatons of fission, instead of about 51.5 Mt), yet still proved the full yield design." So, basically it was a massive explosion but because most of that came from massive fusion reactions which clean themselves up for the most part, it was relatively the cleanest detonation. For perspective, the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs had an efficiency of only 1.4% and 17%. This means that 1.4% and 17% of the fissile material in the bomb reacted, the rest was blown all over the place by the detonation.

Now, the bomb was huge, but relatively inefficient as well. Most of the power of the blast was channeled upwards into space by that shock wave that prevented it from touching the ground. Again, it was a freakin huge bomb so it leveled the crap out of the island, Novaya Zemlya Island, that it was detonated over. It melted the rocks. It broke windows and destroyed houses 34 miles away. It could've given you 3rd degree burns 64 miles away. You could feel the heat 170 miles away. Impressive but....


The best part of all of this, which puts the whole arms race flexing of the Cold War into perspective is this sentence from tsarbomba.org: "The bomb served no military purposes. For that, it would be too heavy to carry and there was no plane able to do intercontinental flights with such a load."

It was useless. Relatively useless. The moment you've all been waiting for:

here's the video of it exploding. 

Awe inspiring and chilling at the same time, isn't it?

Here's another Ronald Reagan one because I think it's fitting.

-Michael