The most powerful nuclear device ever constructed was detonated in the Arctic by the Soviet Union on October 30th, 1961. The bomb, which was known as “The Tsar Bomb,” weighed in at a whopping 27 tonnes and required a specially modified Soviet heavy bomber to carry it. Not only that, but the bomb had to be carried to the ground by a parachute, to allow the aircraft to escape the very considerable blast zone. It wasn’t the most practical of weapons, but it allowed the Soviets to send a message about how good they’d gotten to be at making really big explosions.
When the bomb detonated, it was with the force of 50 million tonnes of high explosive. That’s something in the region of 3800 times more powerful than the bomb used against Hiroshima. So powerful was the blast, that windows were broken in Finland, some 900 kilometres away, and the shockwave travelled around the Earth three times. Astonishingly, the bomb had the potential to deliver a blast twice as powerful but it had to be scaled back or the aircraft which dropped it would have been consumed by the explosion. Blowing up their own pilots was something that even the Soviet Union balked at.
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