Tsar Bomba

On 30 October 1961, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR/Soviet Union) conducted a live test of the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created. Codenamed ‘Ivan', and known in the West as the ‘Tsar Bomba', the RDS-202 hydrogen bomb was detonated at the Sukhoy Nos cape of Severny Island, Novaya Zemla archipelago, in the Barents Sea.

The Tsar Bomba unleashed about 58 megatons of TNT, creating a 8-kilometre/5-mile-wide fireball and then a mushroom that peaked at an altitude of 95 kilometres (59 miles). The shockwave created by the RDS-202 eradicated a village 55 kilometres (34 miles) from ground zero, caused widespread damage to nature to a radius of dozens of kilometres further away, and created a heat wave felt as far as 270 kilometres (170 miles) distant. And still, this was just one of 45 tests of nuclear weapons conducted in the USSR in October 1961 alone.