#TSAR BOMBA FOOTAGE SERIES#
#TSAR BOMBA FOOTAGE WINDOWS#

The footage is a stark reminder of the madness of the Cold War and a sober reminder that we seem to have forgotten its lessons. The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which required tests to move underground. It was also one of the final above ground nuclear tests. The Tsar Bomba was an impractical and devastating weapon. People in Norway and Finland reported feeling a blast that shattered windows. The mushroom cloud climbed 42 miles into the air, seven times higher than Mount Everest.

The blast was visible from 620 miles away. The shock wave of the blast was so powerful it prevented the resulting five mile wide fireball from touching the ground.

It dropped in the sky, but the pilot recovered and landed the plane safely. The shock wave caught the Tu-95V even though it was 75 miles away. It exploded 4,000 meters above the ground. The bomber dropped Tsar Bomba off the coast of Severny Island near the Arctic Ocean. The first 30 minutes of video is in Soviet propaganda style, like a newsreel describing the bomb's journey from construction to detonation.ДЄt 26 feet long and almost 7 feet tall, Tsar Bomba was so large that a specially designed Tu-95V Soviet bomber had some of its fuel tanks and bomb bay doors removed to accommodate it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.RussiaвЂ™s Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation, the portion of the Kremlin that deals with all things nuclear, released the video on August 20 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of RussiaвЂ™s nuclear industry. 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: вЂњThe clouds beneath the aircraft and in the distance were lit up by the powerful flash.

#TSAR BOMBA FOOTAGE WINDOWS#

Windows in faraway Norway and Finland were shattered by the force of the blast. 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.

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 BombaвЂ™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 percentВ chance of survival (they barely made it.)ДЄ 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. 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.)В 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.

#TSAR BOMBA FOOTAGE SERIES#

Courtesy of The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) photo stream.ДЇrom there the United States and the Soviet Union carried out a further series of open-air tests of atomic weapons. The Ivy Mike thermonuclear test, November 1, 1952.

Tsar bomba footage