Tsar Bomba
The Tsar Bomba is the most powerful nuclear weapon or weapon of any kind ever constructed and tested. A project of the Soviet Union, it was a thermonuclear aerial bomb, tested on 30 October 1961 at the Novaya Zemlya site in the country's far north. The bomb yielded 50 megatons of TNT.
The Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov oversaw the project at Arzamas-16, while the main work of design was by Sakharov, Viktor Adamsky, Yuri Babayev,, and Yuri Trutnev. The project was ordered by First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev in July 1961 as part of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing after the Test Ban Moratorium, with the detonation timed to coincide with the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Tested on 30 October 1961, the test verified new design principles for high-yield thermonuclear charges, allowing nuclear explosives "of practically unlimited power". The bomb was dropped by parachute from a Tu-95V aircraft, and detonated autonomously above the cape Sukhoy Nos of Severny Island, Novaya Zemlya, from Mityushikha Bay, north of Matochkin Strait. Blast data and footage was recorded by a Soviet Tu-16. Both aircraft received radiation flash damage.
The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around, which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of. As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate. In theory, the bomb would have had a yield over if it had included the natural uranium tamper which featured in the design but was replaced with lead in the test to reduce radioactive fallout. As only one bomb was built to completion, that capability has never been demonstrated. The design was too large and heavy to be deployed operationally, although it influenced the initial development of the Proton rocket. The next four most powerful nuclear weapons tests ever to have taken place were carried out by the Soviet Union the following year.
The United States government's reaction emphasized the lack of military usefulness, and signalled readiness to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, eventually realized in 1963. It also prompted the disclosure of the US B41 nuclear bomb's yield. In the Western world, the reaction focused on the incorrectly assumed record level of fission product fallout from a typical fissionable tamper design, similar to the US Castle Bravo test disaster. In fact, the Tsar Bomba derived only 3% of its yield from fission, or 1.5 Mt.
Background
In the late 1950s Cold War, the US nuclear weapons arsenal greatly exceeded that of the USSR in quantity of weapons, total explosive yield of weapons, and their ability to deliver the weapon. In the early part of the decade, the Strategic Air Command had begun deploying nuclear-capable bombers, as well as actual weapons, to airbases hosted by US allies within striking distance of the Soviet Union, as well as deploying them on aircraft carriers and on medium-range ballistic missiles in the United Kingdom. The USSR had a credible ability to threaten American allies in Western Europe and Asia via a limited bomber and short-range missile force, had tested a multi-stage thermonuclear weapon in 1955, and had begun testing a prototype rocket for an intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957. Its leadership was well aware that the USSR's deployed nuclear forces in 1960 could not reliably and credibly threaten targets in the continental United States, and that in the event of war, the Soviet Union would struggle to reply in kind. This in turn threatened to weaken Soviet leverage in hot-spots like Berlin, which had been the subject of Soviet and American tension since the end of World War II.Given the Soviet Union's strategic disadvantage concerning America's nuclear weapons possessions, foreign policy and propaganda considerations during the leaderships of Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev made a response to the perceived US nuclear blackmail imperative for both international and domestic reasons. The creation of the Tsar Bomba represented part of a larger effort to maintain the concept of nuclear deterrence, and to impress both domestic and international audiences with the strength of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, even though the weapon itself was arguably impractical.
Name
The name Tsar Bomba is a recent invention dating to the 1990s. Contemporarily, the bomb was referred to by Western Bloc press as the "50-megaton bomb" or "100-megaton bomb".Tsar Bomba was a modification of an earlier project, [|RN202], which used a ballistic case of the same size but a very different internal mechanism. Many published books, even some authored by those involved in product development of 602, contain inaccuracies that are replicated elsewhere, including wrongly identifying Tsar Bomba as RDS-202 or RN202.
The bomb was officially known as "product 602" or "AN602", and codenamed "Ivan". The usage of different names can be a source of confusion. The Tsar Bomba, being a modification of RN202, is sometimes mistakenly labelled as RDS-37, RDS-202 or PH202.
Unofficially, the bomb would later become known as "Tsar Bomba" and "Kuzka's mother". The name Tsar Bomba comes from an allusion to two other Russian historical artifacts, the Tsar Cannon and the Tsar Bell, both of which were created as showpieces but whose large size made them impractical for use. The name "Tsar Bomba" does not seem to have been used for the weapon prior to the 1990s. The name "Kuzka's Mother" was inspired by the statement of Khrushchev to then US Vice President Richard Nixon: "We have funds at our disposal that will have dire consequences for you. We will show you Kuzka's mother!"
The Central Intelligence Agency designated the test as "JOE 111" using their "JOE" counting scheme, which had begun with RDS-1 in 1949.
Development
The development of a very large bomb began in 1956 and was carried out in two stages. At the first stage, from 1956 to 1958, it was "product 202", which was developed in the recently created NII-1011. The modern name of NII-1011 is the "Russian Federal Nuclear Center or the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics". According to the official history of the institute, the order on the creation of a research institute in the system of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building was signed on 5 April 1955; work at the NII-1011 began a little later.At the second stage of development, from 1960 to a successful test in 1961, the bomb was called "item 602" and was developed at KB-11, V. B. Adamsky was developing, and the physical scheme was developed by Andrei Sakharov, Yu. N. Babaev, Yu. N. Smirnov, and Yu. A. Trutnev.
Product 202
After the successful test of the RDS-37, KB-11 employees performed a preliminary calculation and, on 2 February 1956, they handed over to N. I. Pavlov, a note with the parameters for charges of and the possibility of increasing the power to.After the creation in 1955 of the second nuclear center – NII-1011, in 1956, by a resolution of the Council of Ministers, the center was assigned the task of developing an ultra-high-power charge, which was called "Project 202".
On 12 March 1956, a draft Joint Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union on the preparation and testing of the 202 product was adopted. The project planned to develop a version of the RDS-37 with a capacity of.
RDS-202 was designed with a maximum calculated power release of, with a diameter of, a length of, weighing with a parachute system and structurally coordinated with the Tu-95-202 carrier aircraft specially converted for its use. On 6 June 1956, the NII-1011 report described the RDS-202 thermonuclear device with a design power of up to with the required task of. In reality, this device was developed with an estimated power of, after testing the products "40GN", "245" and "205" its tests were deemed inappropriate and canceled.
The Tsar Bomba differs from its parent design – the RN202 – in several places. The Tsar Bomba was a three-stage bomb with a Trutnev-Babaev second- and third-stage design, with a yield of 50 Mt. This is equivalent to about 1,570 times the combined energy of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 times the combined energy of all the conventional explosives used in World War II, one quarter of the estimated yield of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and 10% of the combined yield of all other nuclear tests to date. A three-stage hydrogen bomb uses a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary, as in most hydrogen bombs, and then uses energy from the resulting explosion to compress a much larger additional thermonuclear stage. There is evidence that the Tsar Bomba had several third stages rather than a single very large one. RDS-202 was assembled on the principle of radiation implosion, which was previously tested during the creation of RDS-37. Since it used a much heavier secondary module than in the RDS-37, two primary modules, located on opposite sides of the secondary module, were used to compress it. This physical charging scheme was later used in the design of the AN-602, but the AN-602 thermonuclear charge itself was new. The RDS-202 thermonuclear charge was manufactured in 1956, and was planned for testing in 1957, but was not tested and put into storage. Two years after the manufacture of the RDS-202, in July 1958, it was decided to remove it from storage, dismantle and use automation units and charge parts for experimental work. The CPSU Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a draft Joint Resolution on 12 March 1956, on the preparation and testing of izdeliye 202, which read: