
A bomb of the its yield had little practical applicability: it was large enough in size to make it nearly impossible to deliver through existing systems, and in a battlefield scenario it would potentially kill as many friendlies as enemies.
Tsar bomba radius map archive#
Plans were scaled back when researchers realized that such a device would produce dangerous fallout that could pollute areas far beyond the bomb's test site.Īs the Nuclear Weapons Archive notes, the bomb's design wasn't technologically path-breaking, and "pushed no envelopes, saved for size." The weapon used a thermonuclear detonation to trigger an additional and even larger explosion, a process that could be used to produce ever-larger blasts.īut the Tzar Bomba would represent the high-water mark of explosive output. According to the Nukemap, a project of nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, if the Tzar Bomba were dropped over Business Insider's headquarters at 20th St and 5th Ave in Manhattan, the "radiation zone" in which between 50% and 90% of people would die if they didn't receive medical assistance would stretch from north of Times Square to south of the Brooklyn Bridge, while the fireball would stretch from Brooklyn Heights to the Natural History Museum:Īnd it could have been even larger: Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev originally wanted to test a 100-megaton weapon. The Tzar Bomba's fireball was over 5 miles in width. The ring of absolute destruction had a 35 km radius."

"Third-degree burns were possible at a distance of hundreds of kilometres. "The mushroom cloud reached a height of 60 kilometers ," according to the website of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty Organization. Its yield of 50 megatons, or 5,000 kilotons, was equal to 3,800 of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The Tzar Bomba was a glimpse of just how enormous a human-made nuclear explosion could be.


It often indicates a user profile.Īfter the Soviet Union detonated a 50-megaton bomb over an uninhabited island north of the Arctic Circle on October 30, 1961, it was clear that human beings would need to consciously decide that atomic yields had reached a dangerous saturation point. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
