Russian hydrogen bomb test - explosive force of 50 megatons TNT equivalent historical document 1961
Channel: story bites
Date: 2020-09-05

Russia Declassifies Video From 1961 of Largest Hydrogen Bomb Ever Detonated. The blast was over 3,000 times bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Hydrogen bombs are so destructive, their impact has been described as unthinkable throughout history. This recently declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb test shows why.

The 40-minute documentary shows footage of the largest bomb ever detonated on Earth. Video footage shows the blast from several angles, sometimes struggling to show the entire mushroom cloud in the frame. Later, the documentary compares the ice-covered archipelago before the blast to the scorched, red and brown landscape left behind afterward.

The Soviet Union tested the 50-million-ton hydrogen bomb, officially named RDS-220 and nicknamed Tsar Bomba, in late October 1961. This test occurred during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States competed to build the largest and most destructive nuclear weapons.

The bomb was 26 feet long and almost seven feet tall. It was so large that engineers had to modify the bomber aircraft used to carry it by removing the plane’s bomb bay doors and some of its fuel tanks.
The bombers used a parachute to slow Tsar Bomba’s descent to Earth so that they could detonate it relatively high in the atmosphere and reduce its impact on the ground, according to the video. But the blast created a mushroom cloud 42 miles high, about seven times the height of Mount Everest.