Know more about the Russian Monster Bomb, the Tsar Bomba

New Delhi: Tsar Bomba was developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT; however, the bomb yield was reduced by half in order to limit the amount of nuclear fallout that would result. One bomb was built and tested on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. It is also known as Big Ivan. It was a three-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons (Mt). This is equivalent to ten times the amount of all the explosives used in World War II combined, including Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A three-stage H-bomb uses a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary, as in most H-bombs, and then uses energy from the resulting explosion to compress a much larger additional thermonuclear stage. However, there is evidence that the Tsar Bomba had a number of third stages rather than a single very large one.The Tsar Bomba was flown to its test site by a specially modified Tu-95V release plane, flown by Major Andrei Durnovtsev. At 27 tons, it weighed nearly as much as the Tu-95. It was so big that crews had to cut off the plane's bomb-bay doors in order to fit it in. Even so, at 11:32 am on October 30, 1961, the Tsar Bomba exited Andrei Durnovtsev's plane at a height of 6.5 miles and slowly parachuted towards Mityushikha Bay test range in Novaya Zemlya (giving the drop plane just 188 seconds to escape). At 2.5 miles high, Big Ivan went boom.The resulting fireball had a radius of nearly 10,000 vertical feet and its 210,000 foot tall mushroom cloud reached into the stratosphere. The light generated by the reaction could be seen from over a 1,000 km radius and the force of its explosion registered a 5.0 on the Richter scale. The shock wave generated air pressures topping 300 PSI, circled the Earth thrice, and cracked windows 900 km away in Norway and Finland. Buildings in the abandoned town of Severny 55 km away were leveled—all of them—and upon later inspection, ground zero was reportedly the texture of a skating rink.The Tsar Bomba is the single most physically powerful device ever used by mankind.Footage from a Soviet documentary about the bomb is featured in Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie (Visual Concept Entertainment, 1995), where it is referred to as the Russian monster bomb.