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Concept
Tsar Bomba
Summary
The Tsar Bomba (Tsar'-bomba, Tsar bomb; code name: Ivan or Vanya), also known by the alphanumerical designation "AN602", was a thermonuclear aerial bomb, and the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested. The Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov oversaw the project at Arzamas-16, while the main work of design was by Sakharov, Viktor Adamsky, Yuri Babayev, Yuri Smirnov, and Yuri Trutnev. The project was ordered by Nikita Khrushchev in July 1961 as part of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing after the Test Ban Moratorium, with the detonation timed to coincide with the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Tested on 30 October 1961, the test verified new design principles for high-yield thermonuclear charges, allowing, as its final report put it, the design of a nuclear device "of practically unlimited power". The bomb was dropped by parachute from a Tu-95V aircraft, and detonated autonomously above the cape Sukhoy Nos of Severny Island, Novaya Zemlya, from Mityushikha Bay, north of the Matochkin Strait. The detonation was monitored by United States intelligence agencies, via a KC-135A aircraft (Operation SpeedLight) in the area at the time. A secret U.S. reconnaissance aircraft named "Speed Light Alpha" monitored the blast, coming close enough to have its antiradiation paint scorched.
The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around , which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of . As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate. In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of if it had included the uranium-238 tamper which featured in the design but was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout. As only one bomb was built to completion, that capability has never been demonstrated. The remaining bomb casings are located at the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum in Sarov and the Museum of Nuclear Weapons, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics, in Snezhinsk.
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