Tsar Bomba Tsar Bomba ( ; " Tsar Bomb " ) is the nickname for the AN602 hydrogen bomb , the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated . Its October 30 , 1961 test remains the most powerful artificial explosion in human history . It was also referred to as Kuz ' kina Mat ' ( , Kuzka ' s mother ) , referring to Nikita Khrushchev ' s promise to show the United States a " Kuz ' kina Mat ' " at the 1960 United Nations General Assembly . The famous Russian idiom , which has been problematic for translators , literally meaning “ to show somebody Kuzka ' s mother ” , equates roughly with the English “ We ’ ll show you ! ” Developed by the Soviet Union , the bomb had the yield of . Only one bomb of this type was ever officially built and it was tested on October 30 , 1961 , in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago , at Sukhoy Nos . The remaining bomb casings are located at the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum , Sarov ( Arzamas - 16 ) , and the Museum of Nuclear Weapons , All - Russian Research Institute of Technical Physics , Snezhinsk ( Chelyabinsk - 70 ) . Neither of these casings has the same antenna configuration as the device that was tested . Many names are attributed to the Tsar Bomba in the literature : Project 7000 ; product code 202 ( Izdeliye 202 ) ; article designations RDS - 220 ( РДС - 220 ) , RDS - 202 ( РДС - 202 ) , RN202 ( PH202 ) , AN602 ( AH602 ) ; codename Vanya ; nicknames Big Ivan , Tsar Bomba , Kuz ' kina Mat ' . The term " Tsar Bomba " was coined in an analogy with two other massive Russian objects : the " Tsar Kolokol " ( Tsar Bell ) and the " Tsar Pushka " ( Tsar Cannon ) . The CIA denoted the test as " JOE 111 " . Design . The " Tsar Bomba " was a three - stage Teller – Ulam design hydrogen bomb with a yield of . This is equivalent to about 1 , 350 – 1 , 570 times the combined power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki , 10 times the combined power of all the conventional explosives used in World War II , or one quarter of the estimated yield of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa , and 10 % of the combined yield of all nuclear tests to date . A three - stage H - bomb uses a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary , as in most H - 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 . The initial three - stage design was capable of yielding approximately 100 Mt , but it would have caused too much radioactive fallout . To limit fallout , the third stage and possibly the second stage had a lead tamper instead of a uranium - 238 fusion tamper ( which greatly amplifies the reaction by fissioning uranium atoms with fast neutrons from the fusion reaction ) . This eliminated fast fission by the fusion - stage neutrons , so that approximately 97 % of the total energy resulted from fusion alone ( as such , it was one of the " cleanest " nuclear bombs ever created , generating a very low amount of fallout relative to its yield ) . There was a strong incentive for this modification since most of the fallout from a test of the bomb would have ended up on populated Soviet territory . The components were designed by a team of physicists headed by Academician Yulii Borisovich Khariton and including Andrei Sakharov , Victor Adamsky , Yuri Babayev , Yuri Smirnov , and Yuri Trutnev . Shortly after the Tsar Bomba was detonated , Sakharov began speaking out against nuclear weapon s , which culminated in his becoming a dissident . Test . The Tsar Bomba was flown to its test site by a specially modified Tu - 95V release plane , flown by Major Andrei Durnovtsev . Taking off from an airfield in the Kola Peninsula , the release plane was accompanied by a Tu - 16 observer plane that took air samples and filmed the test . Both aircraft were painted with a special reflective white paint to limit heat damage . The bomb , weighing 27 metric tons , was so large ( long by in diameter ) that the Tu - 95V had to have its bomb bay doors and fuselage fuel tanks removed . The bomb was attached to an 800 kilogram parachute , which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about away from ground zero . When detonation occurred , the Tu - 95V fell one kilometer from its previous altitude due to the shock wave of the bomb . The Tsar Bomba detonated at 11 : 32 ( Moscow time ) on October 30 , 1961 , over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range ( Sukhoy Nos Zone C ) , north of the Arctic Circle over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Sea . The bomb was dropped from an altitude of ; it was designed to detonate at a height of over the land surface ( over sea level ) by barometric sensors . The original , November 1961 A . E . C . estimate of the yield was 55 – 60 Mt , but since 1991 all Russian sources have stated its yield as 50 Mt . Khrushchev warned in a filmed speech to the Supreme Soviet of the existence of a 100 Mt bomb ( technically the design was capable of this yield ) . Although simplistic fireball calculations predicted the fireball would impact the ground , the bomb ' s own shock wave reflected back and prevented this . The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost away from where it ascended . The subsequent mushroom cloud was about high ( over seven times the height of Mount Everest ) , which meant that the cloud was above the stratosphere and well inside the mesosphere when it peaked . The base of the cloud was wide . All buildings in the village of Severny ( both wooden and brick ) , located from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range , were destroyed . In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero wooden houses were destroyed , stone ones lost their roofs , windows and doors ; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour . One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of . The heat from the explosion could have caused third - degree burns away from ground zero . A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement away ; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of . Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances , breaking windows in Norway and Finland . The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth . Its seismic body wave magnitude was about 5 to 5 . 25 . The energy yield was around 8 . 1 on the Richter scale but , since the bomb was detonated in air rather than underground , most of the energy was not converted to seismic waves . The TNT equivalent of the 50 Mt test could be represented by a cube of TNT 312 metres ( 1023 feet ) on a side , approximately the height of the Eiffel Tower . Analysis . The Tsar Bomba is the single most physically powerful device ever used by mankind . By contrast , the largest weapon ever produced by the United States , the now - decommissioned B41 , had a predicted maximum yield of 25 Mt , and the largest nuclear device ever tested by the United States ( Castle Bravo ) yielded 15 Mt ( this was due to an unexpected runaway lithium - 7 reaction ; the preliminary prediction for the yield was from 4 to 6 MT : a 6 Mt maximum predicted yield ) . The largest weapons deployed by the Soviet Union were also around 25 Mt , as in the SS - 18 Mod . 2 ICBM warheads . The weight and size of the Tsar Bomba limited the range and speed of the specially modified bomber carrying it and ruled out its delivery by an ICBM . Much of its high - yield destructiveness was inefficiently radiated upwards into space . It has been estimated that detonating the original 100 Mt design would have released fallout amounting to about 25 percent of all fallout emitted since the invention of nuclear weapons . Hence , the Tsar Bomba was an impractically powerful weapon . It was decided that a full 100 Mt detonation would create too great a risk of nuclear fallout , as well as a near certainty that the release plane ( and crew ) would be destroyed before it could escape the blast radius . The Tsar Bomba was the culmination of a series of high - yield thermonuclear weapons designed by the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1950s ( examples include the Mark - 17 and B41 ) . Such bombs were designed because : Thus certain bombs were designed to destroy an entire large city even if dropped five to ten kilometers from its center . This objective meant that yield and effectiveness were positively correlated , at least up to a point . However , the advent of ICBM s accurate to 500 meters or better made such yields unnecessary . Subsequent nuclear weapon design in the 1960s and 1970s focused primarily on increased accuracy , miniaturization , and safety . The standard practice for many years has been to employ multiple smaller warhead s ( MIRV s ) to " carpet " an area , resulting in greater ground damage . With the nuclear bomb being so powerful at 100 megatons more of the explosion went upwards instead of outwards to affect more of that designated area , instead radiation would be sent into the atmosphere and in turn affect the country that originally launched the bomb .