The biggest bomb
On the morning of October 30, 1961, airmen onboard a modified Soviet Tu-95 bomber dropped the 60,000-pound metal monstrosity they were transporting from the plane’s bomb bay. A gigantic parachute attached to the 26-foot-long device slowed its descent through the vacant skies above Novaya Zemlya, the remote northern Russian archipelago in the Barents Sea. The plane’s pilots then turned the aircraft around and flew—as fast as possible. They knew what would happen when their delivered cargo reached a set altitude, and they wanted to survive what was to come. At thirty miles distant, they saw the explosion, then heard and felt it. Tsar Bomba had detonated. More than sixty years later, the thermonuclear blast equivalent to 57 million tons of TNT (57 megatons), ten times more powerful than all the combined munitions expended during World War II, remains the most enormous human-caused explosion ever recorded on Earth, creating a mushroom cloud 40 miles high and damaging houses hundreds of miles away. … it’s unlikely that we will ever see anything like the Tsar Bomba deployed again. The warhead with the greatest explosive yield in the United States’ arsenal is now just 1.2 megatons, paltry by comparison. But … could we make a much bigger bomb? …
Bigger nuclear bombs could be crafted by building them with multiple stages—a conventional bomb sets off a fission bomb that sets off a fusion bomb that sets off a larger fusion bomb and so on. American theoretical physicist Ted Taylor, credited with developing the smallest, most powerful, and most efficient fission weapons for the US, noted that you could theoretically have “an infinite number” of bombs connected to make one giant bomb. This got Edwar Teller … excited. In 1954, he apparently proposed a 10,000-megaton nuclear weapon to US government officials. … powerful enough to set all of New England on fire. Or most of California. Or all of the UK and Ireland. Or all of France. Or all of Germany. Or both North and South Korea,” … Thankfully, Teller’s fascinations were notoriously frenetic, and this idea soon fell by the wayside. That didn’t stop others from theorizing, however. In the 1970s, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conducted supercomputer calculations that showed that a thermonuclear combustion wave could be initiated inside a large vat of liquid deuterium. … Deuterium fuses with smaller amounts of another hydrogen isotope, tritium, creating massive amounts of energy in the process. The calculations showed that a nuclear bomb filled with 212 tonnes of deuterium would produce a 5,200-megaton explosion.
Ross Pomeroy Daily JSTOR Aug 3 2023