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.Įven its size was monstrous. They used a three-stage Teller-Ulam lithium dry-fuel configuration - similar to the thermonuclear device first demonstrated by the United States during the Castle Bravo shot.Ĭoncerns about fallout prompted Russian scientists to use lead tampers that dialed down the yield to half of the bomb’s capabilities. The designers originally intended the bomb to have a 100-megaton yield. The nuke’s thermal pulse burned the paint off of both planes.Īnd that was small compared to the Soviets’ original plan. The top of the mushroom cloud spread out until it was 60 miles wide. Its mushroom cloud boiled up into the atmosphere until it was 45 miles above ground zero - essentially, on the lower boundaries of space. Witnesses saw the flash through heavy cloud cover more than 600 miles from the blast site. The blast broke windows more than 500 miles away. The shock wave caused the Bear to drop more than half a mile in altitude before Durnovtsev regained control of his aircraft. The five-mile wide fireball reached as high in the sky as the Bear bomber. The chute opened, and the bomb started its three-minute descent to its detonation altitude two-and-a-half miles above the earth.ĭurnovtsev pushed the throttles to the max. When the planes reached their destination at the predetermined altitude of 34,000 feet, he ordered the bomb dropped. This gave Durnovtsev and his comrades a chance to escape. The bomb also had a parachute to slow its drop, giving both planes time to fly about 30 miles from ground zero before the nuke detonated. That’s at least what the scientists hoped the paint would do. The test project’s scientists painted the Bear bomber and its Tu-16 Badger chase plane white to limit heat damage from the bomb’s thermal pulse. 30, 1961, Durnovtsev and his crew took off from an airfield on the Kola Peninsula and headed to the Soviet nuclear test area above the Arctic Circle at Mityushikha Bay, located in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. “Americans like to point to it as an example of how crazy the Cold War was, and how crazy the Russians are and were,” Wellerstein added.
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