The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. Said one aerial eyewitness: “The clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash. Windows in faraway Norway and Finland were shattered by the force of the blast. The world’s second atomic bomb, codenamed Little Boy, was exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Everything within three dozen miles of the impact was vaporized, but severe damage extended to 150 miles radius-enough to entirely annihilate any modern major city, including suburbs. Although no information on the test was released until after the atomic bomb had been used as a weapon, the flash of light and shock wave made a vivid impression over an area with a radius of at least 160 miles. At 40 miles high, it penetrated the stratosphere. The mushroom cloud was 25 miles wide at its base and almost 60 miles wide at its top. The Tsar Bomba’s yield was 50 megatons: ten times more powerful than all of the ordnance exploded during the whole of World War II. The detonation was astronomically powerful-over 1,570 times more powerful, in fact, than the combined two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even so, the crewmen were told that they only had a 50 percent chance of survival (they barely made it.)Ī Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber. The bomb would be attached to a parachute to slow its descent to detonation at 13,000 feet, giving the bomber and its escort additional time to escape at least thirty miles away before detonation. A Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber was designated to deliver the device from 34,000 feet. A nuclear blast, produced by explosion of a nuclear bomb (sometimes called a nuclear detonation), involves the joining or splitting of atoms (called fusion and. Sakharov also played a significant role in designing this weapon, which incorporated multiple inter-reacting stages and was 26 feet long, almost seven feet in diameter, and weighed almost 60,000 pounds. The site chosen for testing this device was Mityushikha Bay on Severny Island in the Arctic Circle. Great Britain emulated these with open air atomic weapons tests in the late 1950s (France would follow with tests in Polynesia in the 1960s and beyond.) While the Americans focused on perfecting accurate delivery systems for small to medium size atomic devices, however, the Soviets concentrated on building larger and larger devices of almost unimaginable power. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. Courtesy of The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) photo stream.įrom there the United States and the Soviet Union carried out a further series of open-air tests of atomic weapons. A nuclear weapon a is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions ( thermonuclear bomb ), producing a nuclear explosion. The atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II codenamed Little Boy and Fat Man, respectivelycaused widespread destruction, leveled. "The thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the US and Russia could bring about a nuclear winter, destroying the essential ecosystems on which all life depends.The Ivy Mike thermonuclear test, November 1, 1952. It is understood that he spent Saturday watching massive nuclear drills, which involved multiple practice missile launches.Īccording to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, (ICANW) "Less than one percent of the nuclear weapons in the world could disrupt the global climate and threaten as many as two billion people with starvation in a nuclear famine. Tensions in the Ukraine have been rising and Russian President Putin has reportedly been flexing his nuclear muscles Thousands of innocent people were killed, with estimates to as many as 226,000 losing their lives. Nuclear weapons have been dropped on inhabited areas only two times - both in 1945, when the US detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blast radius would be so big, tens of thousands of people in Liverpool and Leeds would be badly burned and disabled. The map shows that a far smaller, 50 mega-tonne Tsar Bomb - the biggest the Soviet Union ever tested - could kill 2.1million people and injure a further 2.1million. Should the same bomb ever be dropped on London, it could kill 5.7million and injure a further 3.4million. Not only would it claim 2.4million lives, the blast would also give people as far away as Leicester, Nottingham and Stoke-on-Trent third degree burns.
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