In 1961 the Soviet government carried out the most powerful nuclear test ever carried out in the history of mankind.
The current Ukrainian war and the threats between NATO and Russia have caused the panic before a nuclear conflict to spread again. Throughout history there have been many nuclear tests. The first of these was Trinity, made by Robert Oppenheimer in 1945. From there many others followed, the most powerful was the one carried out in the USSR with the Tsar (Zar) bomb.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, The United States and the USSR had an increasingly large nuclear arsenal. The arms race soon turned into an ambition to possess the largest atomic bomb on the planet. Size mattered, as did power, which is why, over the years, the force with which these devices exploded was increasing.
The Tsar nuclear bomb was the most powerful in history
The high point of this kind of tests came in 1961 when the USSR tested, on October 30 at 11:32 a.m. to be exact, the largest nuclear bomb ever created by humans. The authorities gave him the name of Tsar either Czarwhich meant Caesar in reference to the name that the Russian emperors had received before the appearance of the Soviet republic.
That day, a TU-95 bomber and its crew moved the bomb to Mityushikha Bay, where it was dropped from a height of 10,000 meters. This one had a built-in parachute to slow down its fall and so we can give the crew time to get away the place where it was going to hit.
Slowly the Tsar bomb fell to the ground and once it made landfall it exploded, an explosion that had never been seen before in the history of mankind. The resulting force was 50 megatons, no less than 3,000 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The resulting mushroom reached a height of 60 kilometers high that could be seen at a distance of 1,000 kilometers.
These data indicate the destructive capacity of this Soviet device. In fact, and being true to history, the Soviet authorities considered designing the 100-megaton bomb. The idea ended up being discarded because an explosion of this size would have ended up affecting the global ecosystem.
After the test the Tsar bomb was never manufactured, but made it clear to the whole world that the USSR had the ability to produce it, even more powerful. The passing of the years left the project parked and it was never heard from again, although the recorded images of that day have remained for the memory of all.