July 10, 2026 • 10 mins
In 1961, the USSR set off a 57-megaton atomic bomb, nicknamed the Tsar Bomba. It's still by far the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built. Learn how its test changed history in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/tsar-bomba.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff. Lauren
Vogel bomb here. On October thirtieth of nineteen sixty one,
especially equipped Soviet long range bomber flew toward a remote
chain of islands in the Arctic Ocean called Nova Zemia.
(00:22):
It was a site that the Soviet Union often used
for nuclear tests. The bomber was accompanied by a smaller
plane equipped with the movie camera and instruments for monitoring
air samples and nuclear fallout. But this wasn't a routine
nuclear test. Attached to the underside of the plane was
a thermonuclear bomb that was so big it wouldn't fit
(00:44):
inside the plane's interior bomb bay. This cylindrical device was
roughly the size of a bus twenty six feet long
that's eight meters and nearly seven feet in diameter a
little over two meters. It weighed nearly sixty thousand pounds
that's twenty seven metric tons. The nuclear bomb had the
(01:05):
prosaic name of Item six ZHO two, but it's gone
down in history as the Tsar bomba, the Russian term
for the emperor of nuclear bombs. That name was no exaggeration.
Zar bombas yield is estimated to have been roughly fifty
seven mega tons, which is about one thousand, five hundred
(01:26):
times the combined power of the two atomic bombs that
the US used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World
War II. It's about ten times more powerful than all
of the conventional explosions put off during World War II.
On that day in October of nineteen sixty one, it
was released on a parachute in order to slow its
(01:48):
descent and give the bomber and observer planes time to escape.
When it finally detonated about thirteen thousand feet or four
kilometers above the ground. US was so powerful that it
destroyed everything within a nearly twenty two mile radius that's
thirty five kilometers, and generated a mushroom cloud that towered
(02:10):
nearly two hundred thousand feet or sixty kilometers that's seven
times taller than Mount Everest. Its fireball didn't actually touch
the ground, but it expanded to a radius of about
six miles in the air, which is about nine and
a half kilometers, which would be enough to engulf pretty
much any major city and out into the surrounding metro area.
(02:34):
In Soviet towns, some one hundred miles or one hundred
fifty kilometers from ground zero. Wooden houses were destroyed, and
even brick and stone structures were damaged. Quirks of atmospheric
pressure let the blast shatter windows over ten times that distance,
thousands of miles away in Finland and Norway. The blast
(02:54):
was so powerful that its shockwave caused the release plane
to immediately drop some three thousand feet in altitude about
a kilometer, though the pilot regained control and got the
plane back to its base safely. A Soviet cameraman who
recorded the event was later in the nineteen nineties interviewed
for the Cold War International History Project Bulletin. The writers
(03:18):
of that piece reported that he saw quote a powerful
flash over the horizon, and after a long period of time,
he heard a remote, indistinct and heavy blow, as if
the earth had been killed. Sarbamba's test was symbolic of
the escalating tensions between the USSR and the United States
(03:40):
at the height of the Cold War. After a June
nineteen sixty one summit in Vienna between Soviet Premier and
Nikita Khruschev and US President John F. Kennedy went badly.
Khruztchev apparently decided to take out his frustrations by showing
off their military prowess, including ending the informal moreitarium on
(04:01):
nuclear testing that both countries had maintained since the late
nineteen fifties. The resumption of testing gave Soviet weapons researchers
a chance to try out an idea they had for
building a giant hydrogen bomb, a one that was far
bigger than the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal
atomic bombs included in the frightening logic of all out
(04:23):
nuclear war. Having a high yield h bomb did make
some sense theoretically at the time. Missiles capable of striking
at distant countries were still in their infancy, and the
Soviet Union didn't have many strategic bombers. The US, in contrast,
had a variety of aircraft that could strike from bases
(04:44):
dangerously close to Soviet territory. For the article this episode
is based on, hastuff Work spoke via email with Nikolaisakov,
a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and
Non Proliferation. He explained, if you can only deliver one,
two or three bombs, they better be very powerful. But
(05:07):
the Soviet researchers pushed that idea to an extreme. They
envisioned a hundred megaton weapon with a high level of radiation,
but settled for testing one with only a little more
than half of that explosive power. After their political leadership
expressed worries about radioactive fallout from a larger blast. The
decision to time the explosion a good bit above Earth's
(05:29):
surface also worked in everyone's favor. The bomb's own shockwave
helped repel its fireball further into the sky, Sakov said.
As a result, fallout was very limited, much more limited
than one could expect. The shockwave was really strong, however,
it circumnavigated Earth three times. Even so, Japanese authorities found
(05:55):
the highest level of radiation in rain water that they
had ever detected, as well as an invisible cloud of
radioactive ash that drifted eastward across the Pacific and then
crossed Canada and the Great Lakes region. American scientists reassured
the public that most of the radioactive fallout from Zar
Bomba would stay high in the stratosphere and gradually lose
(06:16):
its radioactivity by the time it fell to Earth. The
Soviets informed the US beforehand of their intention to test
day fifty megaton nuclear bomb. In a speech just a
week before the blast, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell
Gilpatrick suggested that the bomb wasn't intended to intimidate the
United States, but to send a message to the Soviet
(06:38):
Union's restless ally China. He said, perhaps this is also
the Soviet Union's answer to the discordant voice from its
populous neighbor to the south. Zar BOMBA made headlines in
the US, but government officials didn't seem impressed by the
nightmarish display of nuclear destruction. The US had concentric rings
(07:02):
of defenses, from early warning radar to fighter aircraft and
surface to air missiles that would have made it difficult
for a Soviet bomber to succeed in a first strike,
and a device as massive as the Zar BOMBA was
dangerous to the aircraft that dropped it, so much so
that the bomber crew had only been given a fifty
(07:22):
to fifty chance of survival. Theoretically, there is no limit
on how big hydrogen bombs can be. Hastuffworks also spoke
via a mail with Robert Standish Norris, a senior fellow
for Nuclear Policy at the Federation of American Scientists. He
explained that the US a quote, looked into the big
(07:43):
bomb option and decided no, if ever used, zar BOMBA
would clearly kill a lot more people. Accuracy became an option,
and if you improve it by half, you can cut
the yield by a factor of eight. This is what
we did, and the Soviets fall in that way. Tsar
BOMBA ended up being a macab curiosity of the nuclear age.
(08:08):
Hastiff Works also spoke by email Pavel Podvig, now a
senior researcher in the Weapons of Mass Destruction program at
the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He said, everybody
understood that it is too big to be a practical weapon.
From the point of view of destructive power. It's more
efficient to use several smaller weapons than one large one.
(08:31):
No additional devices of this kind were built. Instead, the
Soviet Union went in a different direction. A few years
after the SARBOMBA test, the Soviet missile designers achieved a
major breakthrough with liquid fuel, opening the way to produce
strategic missiles that could be kept ready for launch for
extended periods and hidden in protected silos. No aircraft needed.
(08:57):
By the nineteen seventies, only five percent of the Soviet
nuclear arsenal was in the form of bombs that could
be dropped by aircraft, Sakov said. About nineteen sixty four
nineteen sixty five, the Soviet Union decisively turned toward an
emphasis on ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can carry
several warheads, each of which will strike a different target,
(09:20):
which typically amounted to about two thirds of its strategic
force until about the mid nineteen nineties, when it declined
to roughly fifty percent. After Zarbamba's detonation, the head of
the Soviet nuclear weapons program, physicist Andrey Sakrov, went on
a personal campaign against the use and even testing of
(09:41):
such weapons. He was exiled by his government, and in
nineteen seventy five awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his
work in global human rights. Today, researchers still operate organizations
like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to help educate
and equip everyone one, from the public to policymakers about
(10:03):
how to understand the existential threat that nuclear weapons represent.
To learn more, check out the Bulletin dot org. They're
not a sponsor, just a good organization. Today's episode is
based on the article zarbomba the most powerful nuclear weapon
(10:24):
ever built on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Patrick J. Higer.
Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with
HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff. Lauren
Vogel bomb here. On October thirtieth of nineteen sixty one,
especially equipped Soviet long range bomber flew toward a remote
chain of islands in the Arctic Ocean called Nova Zemia.
(00:22):
It was a site that the Soviet Union often used
for nuclear tests. The bomber was accompanied by a smaller
plane equipped with the movie camera and instruments for monitoring
air samples and nuclear fallout. But this wasn't a routine
nuclear test. Attached to the underside of the plane was
a thermonuclear bomb that was so big it wouldn't fit
(00:44):
inside the plane's interior bomb bay. This cylindrical device was
roughly the size of a bus twenty six feet long
that's eight meters and nearly seven feet in diameter a
little over two meters. It weighed nearly sixty thousand pounds
that's twenty seven metric tons. The nuclear bomb had the
(01:05):
prosaic name of Item six ZHO two, but it's gone
down in history as the Tsar bomba, the Russian term
for the emperor of nuclear bombs. That name was no exaggeration.
Zar bombas yield is estimated to have been roughly fifty
seven mega tons, which is about one thousand, five hundred
(01:26):
times the combined power of the two atomic bombs that
the US used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World
War II. It's about ten times more powerful than all
of the conventional explosions put off during World War II.
On that day in October of nineteen sixty one, it
was released on a parachute in order to slow its
(01:48):
descent and give the bomber and observer planes time to escape.
When it finally detonated about thirteen thousand feet or four
kilometers above the ground. US was so powerful that it
destroyed everything within a nearly twenty two mile radius that's
thirty five kilometers, and generated a mushroom cloud that towered
(02:10):
nearly two hundred thousand feet or sixty kilometers that's seven
times taller than Mount Everest. Its fireball didn't actually touch
the ground, but it expanded to a radius of about
six miles in the air, which is about nine and
a half kilometers, which would be enough to engulf pretty
much any major city and out into the surrounding metro area.
(02:34):
In Soviet towns, some one hundred miles or one hundred
fifty kilometers from ground zero. Wooden houses were destroyed, and
even brick and stone structures were damaged. Quirks of atmospheric
pressure let the blast shatter windows over ten times that distance,
thousands of miles away in Finland and Norway. The blast
(02:54):
was so powerful that its shockwave caused the release plane
to immediately drop some three thousand feet in altitude about
a kilometer, though the pilot regained control and got the
plane back to its base safely. A Soviet cameraman who
recorded the event was later in the nineteen nineties interviewed
for the Cold War International History Project Bulletin. The writers
(03:18):
of that piece reported that he saw quote a powerful
flash over the horizon, and after a long period of time,
he heard a remote, indistinct and heavy blow, as if
the earth had been killed. Sarbamba's test was symbolic of
the escalating tensions between the USSR and the United States
(03:40):
at the height of the Cold War. After a June
nineteen sixty one summit in Vienna between Soviet Premier and
Nikita Khruschev and US President John F. Kennedy went badly.
Khruztchev apparently decided to take out his frustrations by showing
off their military prowess, including ending the informal moreitarium on
(04:01):
nuclear testing that both countries had maintained since the late
nineteen fifties. The resumption of testing gave Soviet weapons researchers
a chance to try out an idea they had for
building a giant hydrogen bomb, a one that was far
bigger than the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal
atomic bombs included in the frightening logic of all out
(04:23):
nuclear war. Having a high yield h bomb did make
some sense theoretically at the time. Missiles capable of striking
at distant countries were still in their infancy, and the
Soviet Union didn't have many strategic bombers. The US, in contrast,
had a variety of aircraft that could strike from bases
(04:44):
dangerously close to Soviet territory. For the article this episode
is based on, hastuff Work spoke via email with Nikolaisakov,
a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and
Non Proliferation. He explained, if you can only deliver one,
two or three bombs, they better be very powerful. But
(05:07):
the Soviet researchers pushed that idea to an extreme. They
envisioned a hundred megaton weapon with a high level of radiation,
but settled for testing one with only a little more
than half of that explosive power. After their political leadership
expressed worries about radioactive fallout from a larger blast. The
decision to time the explosion a good bit above Earth's
(05:29):
surface also worked in everyone's favor. The bomb's own shockwave
helped repel its fireball further into the sky, Sakov said.
As a result, fallout was very limited, much more limited
than one could expect. The shockwave was really strong, however,
it circumnavigated Earth three times. Even so, Japanese authorities found
(05:55):
the highest level of radiation in rain water that they
had ever detected, as well as an invisible cloud of
radioactive ash that drifted eastward across the Pacific and then
crossed Canada and the Great Lakes region. American scientists reassured
the public that most of the radioactive fallout from Zar
Bomba would stay high in the stratosphere and gradually lose
(06:16):
its radioactivity by the time it fell to Earth. The
Soviets informed the US beforehand of their intention to test
day fifty megaton nuclear bomb. In a speech just a
week before the blast, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell
Gilpatrick suggested that the bomb wasn't intended to intimidate the
United States, but to send a message to the Soviet
(06:38):
Union's restless ally China. He said, perhaps this is also
the Soviet Union's answer to the discordant voice from its
populous neighbor to the south. Zar BOMBA made headlines in
the US, but government officials didn't seem impressed by the
nightmarish display of nuclear destruction. The US had concentric rings
(07:02):
of defenses, from early warning radar to fighter aircraft and
surface to air missiles that would have made it difficult
for a Soviet bomber to succeed in a first strike,
and a device as massive as the Zar BOMBA was
dangerous to the aircraft that dropped it, so much so
that the bomber crew had only been given a fifty
(07:22):
to fifty chance of survival. Theoretically, there is no limit
on how big hydrogen bombs can be. Hastuffworks also spoke
via a mail with Robert Standish Norris, a senior fellow
for Nuclear Policy at the Federation of American Scientists. He
explained that the US a quote, looked into the big
(07:43):
bomb option and decided no, if ever used, zar BOMBA
would clearly kill a lot more people. Accuracy became an option,
and if you improve it by half, you can cut
the yield by a factor of eight. This is what
we did, and the Soviets fall in that way. Tsar
BOMBA ended up being a macab curiosity of the nuclear age.
(08:08):
Hastiff Works also spoke by email Pavel Podvig, now a
senior researcher in the Weapons of Mass Destruction program at
the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He said, everybody
understood that it is too big to be a practical weapon.
From the point of view of destructive power. It's more
efficient to use several smaller weapons than one large one.
(08:31):
No additional devices of this kind were built. Instead, the
Soviet Union went in a different direction. A few years
after the SARBOMBA test, the Soviet missile designers achieved a
major breakthrough with liquid fuel, opening the way to produce
strategic missiles that could be kept ready for launch for
extended periods and hidden in protected silos. No aircraft needed.
(08:57):
By the nineteen seventies, only five percent of the Soviet
nuclear arsenal was in the form of bombs that could
be dropped by aircraft, Sakov said. About nineteen sixty four
nineteen sixty five, the Soviet Union decisively turned toward an
emphasis on ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can carry
several warheads, each of which will strike a different target,
(09:20):
which typically amounted to about two thirds of its strategic
force until about the mid nineteen nineties, when it declined
to roughly fifty percent. After Zarbamba's detonation, the head of
the Soviet nuclear weapons program, physicist Andrey Sakrov, went on
a personal campaign against the use and even testing of
(09:41):
such weapons. He was exiled by his government, and in
nineteen seventy five awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his
work in global human rights. Today, researchers still operate organizations
like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to help educate
and equip everyone one, from the public to policymakers about
(10:03):
how to understand the existential threat that nuclear weapons represent.
To learn more, check out the Bulletin dot org. They're
not a sponsor, just a good organization. Today's episode is
based on the article zarbomba the most powerful nuclear weapon
(10:24):
ever built on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Patrick J. Higer.
Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with
HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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