On October 30, 1961, the USSR detonated Tsar Bomba over the Arctic — a blast ~3,000 times Hiroshima. The fireball was so vast the bomb could never be used in a real war. So why build it?
In 2020 Russia released secret film: the bomb hauled by rail, hoisted into a bomber, and the fireball itself rising over the Arctic — footage hidden for nearly 60 years.
Roughly 50 megatons, a fireball five miles wide, a mushroom cloud 42 miles high, and a shockwave that measurably circled the entire Earth three times.
A Tu-95 bomber drops the device by parachute over Novaya Zemlya, giving the crew barely enough time to flee a blast they were only given a 50% chance of surviving.
The physicist behind the bomb later became the USSR's most famous dissident and won the Nobel Peace Prize — haunted by the weapon he helped create.
The remote archipelago the Soviets turned into their main nuclear test site, where 224 detonations were set off far from any witnesses.
The blast radius, third-degree burns at 60-plus miles, and the blunt reason no military ever actually wanted a bomb this absurdly large.
Two years after Tsar Bomba, the superpowers agreed to stop blowing up the sky — banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space.