The mushroom cloud was 25 miles wide at its base and almost 60 miles wide at its top. At 40 miles high, it penetrated the stratosphere. Everything within three dozen miles of the impact was vaporized, but severe damage extended to miles radius—enough to entirely annihilate any modern major city, including suburbs. Windows in faraway Norway and Finland were shattered by the force of the blast.
The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging.
The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it.
The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural. The bomb was 8m long 26ft , had a diameter of nearly 2. The remote archipelago of Novaya Zemlya was selected as the target Credit: Alamy. Tsar Bomba was no ordinary nuclear bomb. It was more than a metal monstrosity too big to fit inside even the largest aircraft — it was a city destroyer, a weapon of last resort. A smaller, modified Tu bomber flew beside, ready to film the ensuing blast and monitor air samples as it flew from the blast zone.
The bomb would slowly drift down to a predetermined height — 13,ft 3,m — and then detonate. By then, the two bombers would be nearly 50km 30 miles away. It should be far enough away for them to survive. Tsar Bomba detonated at , Moscow time. In a flash, the bomb created a fireball five miles wide. The fireball pulsed upwards from the force of its own shockwave.
The flash could be seen from 1,km miles away. It must have been, from a very far distance perhaps, an awe-inspiring sight. On Novaya Zemlya, the effects were catastrophic. In the village of Severny, some 55km 34 miles from Ground Zero, all houses were completely destroyed this is the equivalent to Gatwick airport being destroyed by a bomb that had fallen on Central London.
In Soviet districts hundreds of miles from the blast zone, damage of all kinds — houses collapsing, roofs falling in, damage to doors, windows shattering — were reported. Radio communications were disrupted for more than an hour. One Soviet cameraman who witnessed the detonation said:. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent.
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Read Now. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. This content is imported from YouTube. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. In evaluating the destructive power of a weapons system, it is customary to use the concept of equivalent megatons EMT.
Equivalent megatonnage is defined as the actual megatonnage raised to the two-thirds power:. This relation arises from the fact that the destructive power of a bomb does not vary linearly with the yield.
The volume the weapon's energy spreads into varies as the cube of the distance, but the destroyed area varies at the square of the distance.
Thus 1 bomb with a yield of 1 megaton would destroy 80 square miles. While 8 bombs, each with a yield of kilotons, would destroy square miles.
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