The largest man-made explosion ever

[John Clark]

Exactly 60 years ago today the USSR exploded a 57 megaton thermonuclear bomb, about 1,500 Times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, it was actually capable of twice that power but was deliberately toned down at the urging of the bombs designer Andrei Sakharov; apparently even the communist thought 100+ megatons was a bit too much. Russia recently released a documentary about it: 

The largest H bomb ever exploded

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

[Lawrence Crowell]

With the missile, which expedited delivery time, nuclear bombs were downsized. These colossal bombs were a 1950s development and the US had a 20 megaton bombs deployed on bombers, and with the missile these were largely abandoned by the end of the 1960s. 

LC

[smitra]

On 31-10-2021 13:29, John Clark wrote:
> Exactly 60 years ago today the USSR exploded a 57 megaton
> thermonuclear bomb, about 1,500 Times as powerful as the Hiroshima
> bomb, it was actually capable of twice that power but was deliberately
> toned down at the urging of the bombs designer Andrei Sakharov;
> apparently even the communist thought 100+ megatons was a bit too
> much. Russia recently released a documentary about it:
>

> The largest H bomb ever exploded [1]
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis [2]
>

They replaced the U-238 tamper by a lead tamper to prevent radioactive
fallout. With the U-238 tamper the fast neutrons from the fusion
reactions would have induced fission of U-238 releasing another 50
megaton and also an enormous amount of radioactive fallout.

Saibal

[John Clark]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 10:43 AM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:

> They replaced the U-238 tamper by a lead tamper to prevent radioactive
fallout. With the U-238 tamper the fast neutrons from the fusion
reactions would have induced fission of U-238 releasing another 50
megaton and also an enormous amount of radioactive fallout.

 Yes, and because of that it obtained most of its power from fusion not fission so it was not only the largest but also the cleanest nuclear bomb ever exploded, if you take the size of the yield into consideration.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

Although the USA never actually built them Edward Teller and his team designed 2 super ultra H-bombs in the late 1950s, one was codenamed "Gnomon" and had a yield of 1,000 Megatons, and the other was codenamed "Sundial" and had a yield of 10,000 Megatons.

The untold story of the worlds biggest nuclear bomb

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

hhb

hhb