It carried a special optical device called a bhangmeter useful for calculating the yield of far-off nuclear explosions. The US had a spyplane only tens of kilometres from the blast. Sensors registered the bomb’s blast wave orbiting the Earth not once, not twice, but three times. That is more than 1,500 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two. Tsar Bomba unleashed almost unbelievable energy – now widely agreed to be in the order of 57 megatons, or 57 million tons of TNT. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.” It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. 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 sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. “The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash. One Soviet cameraman who witnessed the detonation said: It should be far enough away for them to survive.ĭurovtsev’s Tupolev was lucky to survive the blast wave from Tsar Bomba caused the giant bomber to plummet more than 1,000m (3,300ft) before the pilot could regain control. By then, the two bombers would be nearly 50km (30 miles) away. The bomb would slowly drift down to a predetermined height – 13,000ft (3,940m) – and then detonate.
In order to give the two planes a chance to survive – and this was calculated as no more than a 50% chance – Tsar Bomba was deployed by a giant parachute weighing nearly a tonne. A smaller, modified Tu-16 bomber flew beside, ready to film the ensuing blast and monitor air samples as it flew from the blast zone. The Tupolev’s pilot, Major Andrei Durnovtsev, brought the aircraft to Mityushikha Bay, a Soviet testing range, at a height of about 34,000ft (10km). Novya Zemlya, a sparsely populated archipelago in the Barents Sea, above the frozen northern fringes of the USSR.
The Tupolev, painted bright white in order to lessen the effects of the bomb’s flash, arrived at its target point. 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. It was the result of a feverish attempt by the USSR’s scientists to create the most powerful nuclear weapon yet, spurred on by Premier Nikita Khruschchev’s desire to make the world tremble at the might of Soviet technology. Now it is better known as Tsar Bomba – the ‘Tsar’s bomb’.
Atomic bomb radius code#
The bomb had become known by a myriad of neutral technical designations – Project 27000, Product Code 202, RDS-220, and Kuzinka Mat (Kuzka’s Mother). It was, physically, very similar in shape to the ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ bombs which had devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade-and-a-half earlier. The bomb was 8m long (26ft), had a diameter of nearly 2.6m (7ft) and weighed more than 27 tonnes. The Tu-95 carried an enormous bomb underneath it, a device too large to fit inside the aircraft’s internal bomb-bay, where such munitions would usually be carried. The pilot who stole a secret Soviet fighter jetīut nothing the Soviet Union had tested would compare to this. The secret nuclear bunker built as the UK’s last hope In the intervening years, their test programme had surged in leaps and starts, detonating more than 80 devices in 1958 alone, the Soviet tested 36 nuclear bombs. On 29 August 1949, the Soviets had tested their first nuclear device – known as ‘Joe-1’ in the West – on the remote steppes on what is now Kazakhstan, using intelligence gleaned from infiltrating the US’s atomic bomb programme. And the Soviets, presented with a rivalry against the world’s only nuclear superpower, had only one option – to catch up. World War Two had placed the US and USSR in the same camp, but the post-war period had seen relations chill and then freeze.
The last decade had seen enormous strides in Soviet nuclear research. The Tu-95 was a specially modified version of a type that had come into service a few years earlier a huge, swept-wing, four-engined monster tasked with carrying Russia’s arsenal of nuclear bombs. On the morning of 30 October 1961, a Soviet Tu-95 bomber took off from Olenya airfield in the Kola Peninsula in the far north of Russia.
0 kommentar(er)
