Tsar Bomba (Russian: Царь-бомба, meaning literally "Emperor Bomb"), developed by the Soviet Union, is the largest nuclear explosive ever to be detonated, and is also the highest power device ever used by humans. It was detonated on October 30, 1961, as a test; this took place at a height of 4,000 metres over the Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea; it was dropped from a Tu-95 bomber.



The name was coined in an analogy with Tsar Kolokol, an extraordinarily large bell and Tsar Cannon, an extraordinarily large howitzer. Both had been built as demonstrations of technical prowess rather than for use. The bomb was meant for the same purpose. During its development, it was nicknamed Ivan.

Tsar Bomba was a multi-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons. (The original US estimate was 57 megatons, but since 1991 all Russian sources have cited it as "only" 50 megatons [1].) The design was capable of approximately 100 megatons. It was purposely reduced shortly before the launch, though Nikita Khrushchev initially reported a yield of 100 Mt, and cited this number in his speeches. The nuclear devices of the type used in the bomb were designed by a team of physicists headed by Academician Igor Kurchatov and included Andrei Sakharov, Victor Adamsky, Yuri Babayev, Yuri Smirnov, and Yuri Trutnev (А.Д.Сахаров, В.Б.Адамский, Ю.Н.Бабаев, Ю.Н.Смирнов, Ю.А.Трутнев).

It was not intended for use in warfare; it was developed and tested as part of the sabre-rattling between the Soviet Union and United States in the course of the Cold War. The launch date was matched to the time of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU.



Excluding the nuclear device, Tsar Bomba was designed and constructed in only 14 weeks after Khrushchev initiated the project on July 10, 1961. The bomb itself weighed 27 tonnes and was 8 metres long by 2 metres wide; a special parachute (itself weighing 0.8 tonne) had to be designed to allow it to be dropped from an airplane. A possibly apocryphal story claims that the fabrication of this parachute needed so much raw nylon that the negligible Soviet nylon hosiery industry was noticeably disrupted.

The Tsar Bomba had its yield scaled down by replacing the uranium fusion tamper (which amplifies the reaction greatly) with one made of lead to eliminate fast fission by the fusion neutrons. For this reason it was actually a very "clean" test, with approximately 97% of the energy coming from fusion rather than fission (fusion produces no fallout, unlike a fission explosion).

Tsar Bomba was detonated on October 30, 1961, over the nuclear testing range at Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea. It was dropped from a specially modified Tu-95 bomber at 11:30 a.m. at 10,500 metres altitude by pilot Major Andrei E. Durnovtsev. The bomb was detonated at 11:33 a.m. with the aid of barometric sensors at the height 4,000 metres over the land surface (4,200 over the sea level). The fireball touched the ground and reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, which was already in the safe zone some 45 km away. Light from the detonation was visible 1,000 km away; the mushroom cloud rose as high as 64 km and developed to a width of 30-40 km.

The 50-Mt test was hot enough to have induced third degree burns at 100 km, and atmospheric irregularities caused blast damage up to 1,000 km away (due to atmospheric focusing, where localized regions of destructive blast damage can be created many hundreds of kilometers away); the "dirty" 100-Mt version would have laid lethal radioactivity over an enormous area. The earthquake it produced was readable on its third time around the earth. It has been estimated that fission debris from detonation of the original 100-Mt design would have increased the total world fission fallout since the invention of nuclear weapons by 25%.

A bomb of this magnitude has tremendous "blowback" potential to its user (the large amounts of fallout the full version would have created would have easily been dispersed onto Warsaw Pact nations were it used against a European power), while at the same time being very inefficient, as it radiates much of its energy out into space. Modern nuclear weapon tactics call for multiple smaller bombs to produce more damage on the ground (for example, using MIRVs to deliver a "carpet" of warheads over a large area). It was not practical for use as a weapon in wartime, requiring a specially modified bomber that could not be used to deliver the massive bomb to a distant target.

Because the Tsar Bomba is the highest energy device ever detonated, it also represents the highest power device ever used by humans. Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process that took place in around 3.9×10-8 seconds or 39 nanoseconds was around 5.3×1024 watts or 5.3 yottawatts. This represents a power just greater than one percent of the average power output of the Sun (383 yottawatts).

Novaya Zemlya
The archipelago of Novaya Zemlya (Russian: Но́вая Земля́, "New Land"; formerly known as Nova Zembla) consists of two major islands in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia, separated by the narrow Matochkin Strait, and a number of smaller ones. The two main islands are Severny (northern) and Yuzhny (southern). Novaya Zemlya separates the Barents Sea from the Kara Sea. The total area is about 90,650 km².



The area is very mountainous, as geologically Novaya Zemlya is the continuation of the Ural Mountains. It is separated from the mainland by the Kara Strait. The mountains reach a height of 1070 meters. The northern island contains many glaciers, while the southern one has a tundra climate. Natural resources include copper, lead and zinc. The indigenous population consists of about 100 Nenetses, who subsists mainly on fishing, trapping and seal hunting.

The Russians knew of Novaya Zemlya from the 11th or 12th century, when traders from Novgorod visited the area. For western Europeans, the search for the Northeast passage in the 16th century led to its exploration. The first visit was by Hugh Willoughby in 1553. Willem Barents in 1596 rounded the north point of Novaya Zemlya, and wintered on the east coast near the northern tip. During this voyage the west coast was mapped.


A nuclear testing site named North Test Site was constructed in the mid-1950s, and existed during much of the Cold War. "Site A", Chernaya Guba (70.7N 54.6E), was used mostly from 1955–62. "Site B", Matochkin Shar (73.4N 54.9E) was used for underground tests in 1964–90. "Site C", Sukhoy Nos (73.7N 54.0E), was used from 1957–62 and was the 1961 explosion site of Tsar Bomba, a record 50-megaton burst. Other tests occurred elsewhere throughout the islands, with an official testing range covering over half of the landmass. In 1989, glasnost helped make the Novaya Zemlya testing activities public knowledge and opened the door for environmental assessment, and only a year later Greenpeace activists staged a protest at the site.

The last nuclear test explosion was in 1990 (also the last for the entire Soviet Union and Russia). Due to the climatic conditions, MinAtom has performed a series of subcritical hydronuclear experiments near Matochkin Shar each summer from July to August since 2000. These tests reportedly involve up to 100 g of weapons-grade plutonium.

Apart from nuclear tests, the Novaya Zemlya test site has been evaluated as a site for a range of other activities, including nuclear waste storage. For more than a decade, Russia has been considering the storage of low-, medium-, and high-level radioactive waste, as well as spent fuel and nuclear reactors from nuclear submarines, on Novaya Zemlya.  The first plans, for the storage of low- and medium-radioactive waste, including cesium and cobalt, were developed in 1991 by the All-Russian Scientific Research and Design Institute of Industrial Technology (VNIPI Promtekhnologii) and the All-Russian Scientific Research and Design Institute of Energy Technology (VNIPIET).  A site on the south of the southern island, north of Bashmachnaya Bay, was selected, and construction of the storage site included in the special federal program "On the Treatment of Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Materials, Their Recycling, and Their Disposal from 1996-2005."[1,2,3,4]  According to current plans, the facility will house radioactive waste from Northern Fleet nuclear-powered submarines in addition to waste in temporary storage at  the Mironova Gora site near Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk Oblast.  Public hearings regarding construction of the facility were carried out in 2001, and a positive environmental impact assessment was completed in March 2002.  Construction will cost an estimated $73 million and take three to four years.[5]  Russian environmental groups are protesting against the facility, saying that spending levels are too low to implement adequate safety measures, and that Novaya Zemlya lacks the infrastructure for constant radiation monitoring.[6]

A large solid radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel storage facility may also be built on Novaya Zemlya. By May 2001, five 300-meter test shafts had already been drilled to test radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel burying technologies.[7] The waste would be stored underground in cement-lined shafts that are 90 meters deep. Novaya Zemlya was chosen because of its permafrost conditions: groundwater can be found only at a depth of 600 meters. According to Nikolay Lobanov, scientific head of the project, the shafts can withstand a 150-megaton (MT) nuclear explosion and a 7.0 earthquake.[8] The project has been ordered by Atomredmetzoloto, and a design drafted by VNIPI Promtekhnologii; its main subcontractors are VNIPIET and Gidrospetsgeologiya.[5,9]  The facility’s projected capacity is 50,000 cubic meters. An international consortium, consisting of Deutsche Gesellschaft zum Bau und Betrieb von Endlagern fuer Abfallstoffe mbH (Germany), Gesellschaft fuer Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit mbH (Germany), Posiva Oy (Finland), AEA Technology (United Kingdom), Institutt for energi teknikk (Norway), and Svensk Kaernbraenslehantering AB (Sweden), is assessing the project's safety.[7]  Environmentalists oppose the plan due to safety concerns and fears that imported spent nuclear fuel may eventually be stored at the site.  Arkhangelsk Governor Anatoliy Yefremov has denied this, saying that all wastes will originate in northwest Russia.[6]

Another proposal for dealing with the problem of spent fuel, nuclear reactors, and radioactive waste from nuclear-powered submarines involves the use of underground nuclear explosions to vitrify the spent fuel and radioactive waste in tunnels at the Central Atomic Test Site on Novaya Zemlya.  The proposal, first introduced in 1994, soon met with opposition over the possibility that the explosions might violate the CTBT.   Nevertheless, at the request of then-president Boris Yeltsin, the Central Physical-Technical Institute (TsFTI) in Sergiyev Posad developed techniques for implementing the project, which never came to fruition.[10]  In June 1999, TsFTI Chief Scientific Associate Leonid Yevterev and several other scientists published an article in Nezavisimoye voyennoye obozreniye, again making an argument for the implementation of their plan.[11]

Testing: 
From 1955 to 1990, the Soviet Union conducted 130 nuclear tests--88 atmospheric, 39 underground, and 3 underwater tests--at Novaya Zemlya. The Soviet Union/Russia has not conducted a nuclear test since 24 October 1990.[1,2] A nuclear test moratorium was initially announced by President Gorbachev in October 1991. On 19 October 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin extended the moratorium to July 1993. On 3 July 1993, President Yeltsin extended the moratorium through September 1994. The test moratorium was extended indefinitely in January 1995. Russia signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on 24 September 1996 and ratified it on 27 May 2000.[3,4,5] Russia conducts hydrodynamic or subcritical tests at the country's only remaining internal test site, which is located on the Gulf of Matochkin Shar. Using hydrodynamic tests, scientists examine the fissile materials in stockpiled nuclear munitions to study the service life, reliability and safety of the munitions.[6] Russia staged seven non-nuclear explosions in 1999 and one subcritical test in January 2000.[7] (For details, see development from 30 May 2000 below.) (See also the entries under Russia: Treaties: CTBT and Nuclear Testing Developments.)

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