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.
