In mid-October 1961, just in time for the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev announced that he intended to detonate a hydrogen bomb containing 50 million tons of trinitrotoluene (50 kilotons). Then he boasted: “We also have a bomb with a charge of 100 million tons. But we won’t try it, because that way we might break our own windows,” wrote the German Die Welt in an extensive publication on the subject, quoted by German wave.
US President John Kennedy reacted immediately, the publication recalls. “The explosion of such a bomb cannot have a justifiable purpose”, the White House said at the time. The most powerful bomb tested so far by the US had a charge of 15 megatons.
Anxiety is great. The radioactive contamination could, depending on the winds, cover an area of 25,000 to 50,000 square kilometers. There is also a risk of second-degree burns at a distance of 56 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. In a 19 kilometer radius around it, the shock wave would destroy everything, and the fireball would burn everything in the innermost 4 kilometer radius around the detonation point.
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The blast wave goes around the globe twice
These warnings, however, did not impress Khrushchev at all, Die Welt further wrote. He ordered his ambassador to the UN, Semyon Zaparkin, to cynically explain the following: “The bomb should only ensure that Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happen again. This is the real humanism of today”. Khrushchev’s plan is to scare the Americans to death.
The order for the explosion follows – on October 30, 1961, at around 11:30 Moscow time, the huge Tu-95 strategic bomber drops the “product” (as the Russians officially call it) from more than 10,000 meters above the island of Novaya Zemlya. The bomb is equipped with parachute to give the aircrew enough time to get away without being hurt by the explosion.The bomb measured two by eight meters and weighed 27 tons.
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In the explosion that followed two minutes after it was thrown from the plane, a ball of fire covered the earth’s surface, and the atomic sponge in a short time rises to a height of over 64 kilometers, that is, it reaches the mesosphere – the middle of the three atmospheric layers. The shock wave travels around the globe twice, and only on the third time it weakens to the point that it can only be measured with the most sensitive instruments. In addition, the bomb caused tremors of the sixth magnitude on the Richter scale.
As far as is known, no one died in the explosion. Only a few hundred people lived on the 900-kilometer-long island at the time, but none of them were located less than 100 kilometers from the site of the explosion.
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As “Di Welt” points out – this bomb was not suitable for military purposes. The plane could only drop it because it was modified and the flaps of the bomb bay were removed. From 1962 to 1964 in the USA and in the Soviet Union more followed over a hundred nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and in the water before the two great powers agreed to conduct atomic weapons tests only underground. the detonation of the Tsar Bomba makes the world realize that it needs a nuclear disarmament program. This explosion became the culmination of the Cold War, and to this day is included in the Guinness Book of Records, as it has no analogue in history.
Source: Deutsche Welle
2023-10-19 07:41:15
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