Tsar Bomba, Kuzka's Mother, Project AN602, Big Ivan, Ivan Bomb — a thermonuclear aerial bomb developed in the USSR in 1954–1961 by a group of nuclear physicists led by academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences I. V. Kurchatov.
It was tested on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The yield of the explosion exceeded the combined power of all the weaponry used during the Second World War.
Nature of the Device
The most powerful explosive device (yielding, according to various estimates, from 57 to 58.6 megatons of TNT equivalent) in all of human history. It was created in Arzamas-16 in Nizhny Novgorod Region.
The bomb could have completely destroyed Paris.
It had a three-stage design: the nuclear charge of the first stage (calculated contribution to the yield — 1.5 megatons) triggered a thermonuclear reaction in the second stage (contribution to the yield — 50 megatons), which in turn initiated a nuclear "Jekyll-Hyde reaction" in the third stage (another 50 megatons of yield).
The device turned out to be so large that it did not fit into the bomb bay of the Tu-95 carrier aircraft and partially protruded from it. Despite the successful test, the bomb was never adopted for service; nevertheless, the creation and testing of the superbomb carried great political significance, demonstrating that the USSR had solved the problem of achieving virtually any level of nuclear-arsenal megatonnage.
Background
It is generally believed that "Tsar Bomba" was designed on the orders of N. S. Khrushchev in record time — with the entire development and manufacture taking just 112 days. In reality, work on the RN202/AN602 had been underway for more than seven years — from the autumn of 1954[3] to the autumn of 1961 (with a two-year break in 1959—1960). During 1954—1958, work on the 100-megaton bomb was carried out by NII-1011.
It should be noted that the information above about when the work began partly contradicts the institute's official history (now the Russian Federal Nuclear Center — All-Russian Research Institute of Technical Physics/RFNC-VNIITF). According to that history, the order establishing the corresponding research institute within the USSR Ministry of Medium Machine Building was signed only on April 5, 1955, and work at NII-1011 actually began several months later still. In any case, only the final stage of AN602's development (by then at KB-11 — now the Russian Federal Nuclear Center — All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics/RFNC-VNIIEF) in the summer and autumn of 1961 (and by no means the project as a whole!) really did take 112 days. Even so, AN602 was not simply a renamed RN202.
ensured strictly synchronous opening of all three locks (a requirement dictated by safety conditions).
On March 17, 1956, a joint resolution of the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers No. 357—228ss was issued, under which OKB-156 was to begin converting the Tu-95 into a carrier for high-yield nuclear bombs. This work was carried out at the Air Force Flight Research Institute (Zhukovsky) from May to September 1956. The Tu-95V was then accepted by the customer and handed over for flight testing, which was conducted (including the drop of a "superbomb" mock-up) under the command of Colonel S. M. Kulikov until 1959 and proceeded without significant issues. In October 1959, a crew from Dnipropetrovsk delivered "Kuzka's Mother" to the test range.
The test of the world's most powerful explosive device took place on October 30, 1961, during the days of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU.
The aircraft, having already taken off on its mission and armed, initially had to be recalled to base due to a failure of the radar guidance instrument. This created a dilemma — drop the bomb and lose the fruits of enormous efforts, or land the aircraft with the bomb already armed, risking its detonation. Academician Sakharov) and his colleague personally signed a document certifying that the landing was safe. Only after landing and fixing the fault did a second sortie take place, which was successful.
The Explosion
The detonation took place within the "Sukhoy Nos" nuclear test site (73°51′ N, 54°30′ E (G)) at an altitude of 4200 m above sea level (4000 m above the target) (though other figures for the detonation altitude have also been cited — in particular, 3700 m above the target (3900 m above sea level) and 4500 m). The yield noticeably exceeded the calculated value (51.5 megatons) and came to between 57 and 58.6 megatons of TNT equivalent. There is also evidence that, according to initial data, AN602's yield was substantially overstated and was being estimated at figures up to 75 megatons.
One observer reported that "wooden houses were destroyed and the roofs torn off stone buildings within a radius of hundreds of kilometers from the site of the explosion."
The flash could be observed at a distance of 1,000 km, even though the site of the explosion — the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic — was shrouded in a dense cloud. A mushroom cloud rose 70 km into the sky.
One Soviet cameraman said that the explosion looked like a "powerful white flash" on the horizon, followed by a "distant, indistinct sound of impact, as if the Earth itself had been killed."
"Tsar Bomba" knocked out all communications in the Arctic region for more than an hour. Personnel at the "Olenya" air base, to which the bomber was due to return, received no confirmation that the aircraft was intact or that the bomb had been dropped.
Novaya Zemlya, over which the explosion took place, was transformed from an uneven landscape of ice and snow into, as one observer put it, a "giant skating rink."
Interesting Facts
- The shock wave from Tsar Bomba circled the globe three times.
- The name "Kuzka's Mother" arose from N. S. Khrushchev's famous remark, "We'll show America Kuzka's mother yet!" Officially, the AN602 bomb had no name at all.
- The original version of the bomb was rejected because of the extremely high level of radioactive contamination it would have caused — it was decided not to use the third stage of the explosion process (the "Jekyll-Hyde reaction") and to replace the uranium components with their lead equivalent.
- At various times, rumors also circulated that the bomb's yield had been halved compared to what was planned, because scientists feared the emergence of a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction in the atmosphere. Interestingly, similar fears (though about the possibility of a self-sustaining nuclear-fission reaction arising in the atmosphere) had already been voiced earlier — during preparations for the test of the first atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. At the time, those fears went so far that one overly anxious scientist was not only barred from the test but was also placed under a doctor's care.
- There were also fears that the explosion might trigger a thermonuclear reaction in seawater, which contains some amount of deuterium, and thereby set off an explosion of the oceans that would split the planet apart.
- The results of the AN602 tests also became the subject of a number of other rumors and hoaxes. For instance, it was sometimes claimed that the explosion's yield reached 120 megatons. This was probably caused by "layering" the information that the actual yield exceeded the calculated one by roughly 20 % (in reality, by 14-17 %) on top of the bomb's original design yield (100 megatons — more precisely, 101.5 megatons). Fuel was added to such rumors by the newspaper Pravda, which officially stated on its pages that "It (the AN602) is yesterday's atomic weapon. Even more powerful charges have now been created." In reality, more powerful thermonuclear munitions — for example, a warhead for the UR-500 ICBM (GRAU index 8K82; the well-known Proton launch vehicle is a modification of it) with a yield of 150 megatons, though genuinely under development, never got past the drawing board.