It was a very cold morning, you can only afford it in special clothes. It is now October 30, 1961, and this weather is typical in a completely remote area of the islands of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago (New Land) in the Arctic Ocean, in present-day northern Russia. For a moment everything was quiet, but in a fraction of a second a ball of light emerged that was several kilometers wide, people saw it at a distance of about a thousand kilometers and felt its impact a few seconds after the event when their bodies trembled and the walls of their houses shook and pieces of glass fell from some windows, for example, that the explosion in Alexandria in northern Egypt is seen and felt by people in Aswan, or that it is close to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia that people see and feel in Yemen Oman, Iraq, Jordan, and even across the Persian Gulf in the Iranian city of Isfahan!

It didn't end there, in a few seconds this ball of light turned into a cloud forty kilometers wide, probing the sky up more than 60 kilometers. If you see it, there is no doubt that you will think that it is the end of the world, and that the resurrection has come, but it is only a practical test conducted by the Soviets for the bomb of the Tsar (1) or Ivan the Great, the most powerful bomb in the history of the world and still, and to understand the horror of the event is enough for you only to know that the shock wave of this bomb crossed the world three times and was spotted in several ground stations, in addition to that the bomb caused a seismic wave that crossed through the earth's crust and circled the entire globe three times.

#روسيا released secret video footage Friday of the largest nuclear explosion on Earth when the Soviet Union detonated a #القيصر bomb in a test in October 1961.

The hydrogen bomb, carrying a force of 50 million tons of explosives, was detonated four thousand meters above the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago. pic.twitter.com/KLidfjmu6b

— Al Jazeera Documentary (@AljazeeraDoc) August 28, 2020

A short history of the "might" of the Soviets

That bomb was the biggest concrete proof that hell has no bottom, if I come up with a small nuclear bomb I will create a big one, and if I invent something bigger than my bomb I will create something bigger and bigger, we are not talking here by the way about the tampering of young children, but the policies of countries! But before we delve into that tragedy that does not stop on its own, like the reaction of nuclear fission, let's go back in time to another morning, we are now on August 29, 1949, twelve years before the bombing of the Tsar.

Meanwhile, one of the trains was halfway between the city of Arzamas in western Russia and the city of Semipalatinsk in eastern Kazakhstan, several hours before the arrival of the train, which was firmly fixed by the eyes of the men of Moscow's political and military leadership, especially Igor Kurchatov, the scientific director of the Soviet nuclear bomb program. Obviously, this train was not intended to carry important passengers or goods, but carried the first Soviet nuclear bomb, called RDS-2, or as the Westerners called it, "Joe I", from research laboratories to the test area.

Like the Americans, the Soviets built a metal tower on top of which the bomb hung, and in addition to instruments that measured the power of the bomb and the intensity of the radiation, they built wooden and brick houses, bridges, tunnels, and water towers near the tower, and even placed animals in cages scattered near and far from the tower, so that they could study the effects of nuclear radiation in depth. With the success of the bombing, Kurchatov shouted several kilometers away in a fortified room: "It works! It works!"

We don't know much about the Soviet project to build a nuclear bomb, but we do know that the Soviet scientific community discussed the possibility of making an atomic bomb throughout the thirties of the last century, and made the first concrete proposal to develop this weapon in 1940, in addition to that the Russian physicist Georgy Flowerov suspected that the Allied forces were secretly developing a "superweapon" in 1939. Flyorov wrote a letter to Stalin urging him to start this program within three years.3

But the Soviets initially slowed down, and after Stalin learned of the American bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he ordered the program to be accelerated scientifically and intelligence, as the Soviets closely monitored the German nuclear weapons project and the American Manhattan Project. It is at this point that Klaus Fuchs,4 a German-born atomic scientist who provided the Soviets with important information about the bomb design and technical specifications, and the Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy concluded that Fox had affected people's safety and done damage "greater than any other spy," not only in U.S. history but in world history.

The Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy concluded that Klaus Fuchs had affected people's safety and done "greater harm than any other spy." (Social Media)

Perhaps it is an exaggeration because, contrary to popular belief, there was no "big secret" behind the atomic bomb, as the nuclear fission reaction was discovered in 1938, and it was declared worldwide that the energy produced by this process could be used to produce a weapon of extraordinary power.

Therefore, physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists at the Manhattan Project knew that it was only a matter of time before other countries could develop their own atomic weapons through trial and error, and if they budgeted appropriately for the project, because the problem is not the interaction itself, but the specifications of the bomb, its composition and the way it works. Of course, as you know, there will be no more than the Soviets (and Americans, of course) who can allocate huge budgets for weapons that we don't know how can change our lives. In fact, the Soviets were able to conduct the first fission-chain reaction inside a graphite structure(5) in 1946, and after experiencing some difficulties in producing plutonium and separating uranium isotopes over the next two years, Soviet scientists were able to operate their first production reactor.

Image of Trinity bombing several milliseconds later (French)

This brings us back to Joe I, the bomb that is equivalent in strength to the Trinity bomb that was tested in the US state of New Mexico on July 16, 1945 with a power of 20 kilotons, where Western warlords were surprised by the success of the test, as American intelligence estimated that the Soviets would not produce an atomic weapon until 1953, while the British expected that this would happen in 1954, for this reason precisely the Klaus Fox case came to become overnight the most important espionage operation ever for some, although What the man offered is only likely to have accelerated the past Soviet nuclear program already on its way for a period ranging from six months to a maximum of two years.

And the world is nothing but a great mushroom cloud

At that moment, the world was not what it used to be, and as the Cold War grew, both the Soviet Union and the United States began to "enlarge" their bombs. In January 1950, US President Truman (6) made a decision to continue and intensify the research and production of nuclear weapons, with the aim of simply turning atomic bombs into a weak weapon against a formidable new weapon the world had never seen before: the hydrogen bomb.

Both nuclear fusion (which makes the hydrogen bomb) and nuclear fission (which makes the atomic bomb) work on one principle: converting a very small amount of matter into a very large amount of energy, according to Einstein's theory of relativity and his most famous equation of all: energy is equal to the mass of matter times the square of the speed of light (E = mc 2), and the last criterion of the equation is a huge number that you won't even be able to read. A nuclear weapon, whatever its nature, produces approximately 85 percent of its energy in the form of a shock explosion and thermal energy, while the remaining 15 percent emits deadly nuclear radiation, the effect of which extends over the years after the explosion.

However, there is a big difference(7) in the mechanism of action of these two methods, which is that nuclear fission, as its name suggests, depends mainly on splitting a major atom (usually uranium or plutonium isotopes) into smaller atoms with a loss of mass to convert into energy, while nuclear fusion depends on the fusion of two smaller atoms (usually hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium) to form a larger atom, with a loss of mass converted into energy.

Although a fusion bomb is three to four times more powerful than fission, it takes a lot of energy to happen, because atoms are inherently repelled, and to counteract this repulsion we need tens of millions of degrees Celsius of heat. In fact, it's the same reaction that takes place in the Sun's interior, which is so large that if it were a container, it would hold more than a million balls the size of Earth.

It seems that the Soviets had the early ideas of the fusion bomb before or in conjunction with the Americans, as Russian fusion bomb designers imagined in 1948 that adding a shell of unenriched natural uranium around deuterium would lead to the success of the reaction, because natural uranium would split as a prelude to building the heat needed to start a nuclear fusion, this bomb was called "Sloika" or layered cake, and it was also known as (8) "RDS-6S", which was a crucial step between the bombs Fission and hydrogen bombs.

Soviet beta test "RDS 6" (social media)

Race for what?

The cake design was detonated on August 12, 1953 on one of the islands of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, around this time the United States detonated its first hydrogen bomb on November 1, 1952, in what was called the "Mike test", both RDS-6 and Mike were a primitive test, it required further improvement, but the Soviets and Americans were in an open arms race, so the resources were unimaginably abundant.

In 1954, the Soviets came up with the idea of a two-stage hydrogen nuclear bomb, instead of using the heat and pressure resulting from the process of nuclear fission in a layer of uranium, a complete fission bomb was used that releases a radiation wave that in turn ignites the fuse of the fusion reaction in the second stage because of the enormous heat it causes, and here appeared (9) "RDS-37", the bomb that was successfully tested on November 22, 1955 and released energy of more than 4 times its predecessor (1.6 megatons). Nearly a hundredfold larger than the first Soviet atomic bomb six years ago, it is clear that the Soviet Union can rival and even surpass the United States.

Explosion of the bomb "RDS-37" with a force equal to 16 million tons of trinitrotoluene (social media)

It is enough for you to look at the escalation to understand how this race works, the energy generated by the explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was estimated at only 15-20 kilotons (note that in the previous paragraph we used the word "megaton" and not "kiloton"). In nuclear science, the amount of energy coming out of a bomb is estimated at the corresponding amount of trinitrotoluene (TNT) that will generate the same amount of energy when it explodes. Thus, a nuclear weapon that gives one kiloton is one that produces the same amount of energy as a kiloton (thousand tons) of TNT. Similarly, a megaton weapon would have the equivalent of detonating one million tons of TNT (a thousand kilotons), and to understand the enormous impact of nuclear bombs, it is enough to know that the famous grenade in warfare, which appears in many movies, contains only 50-60 grams of trinitrotoluene.

At this time, the Americans(10) had already conducted the "Castle Bravo" experiment, a test of a hydrogen bomb conducted in the bikini ring, an annular reef in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which was detonated on February 28, 1954, and this bomb produced a fission explosion with a force of 15 megatons, the largest nuclear bomb detonated in the history of the United States of America, followed by "Castle Yankee", which was detonated on the fifth of May / May 1954 in Same position, and emitted a capacity equivalent to 13.5 megatons.

To hell

But the Russians after that stage set off towards hell non-stop, and here in particular appears the Tsar bomb (11), with a length of eight meters and a width of two and a half meters and a weight of approximately 27 tons, the Tsar bomb consists of three stages, the first is a fission bomb that causes the conversion of a sleeve of "foam" that surrounds the whole main bomb into plasma (a special case of matter at high temperatures), which in turn ignites the fuse of nuclear fusion in the second bomb, which in turn activates a second nuclear fission inside it, and exchanges Fusion and fission Interact together until the temperature reaches 100 million degrees Celsius, all in a very small fraction of a second, and then the bomb explodes, with an estimated capacity of 58 megatons, and to understand this number, it is equal to ten times all the war force that was used in World War II!

(Social Media)

Curiously, the bomb was designed to produce 100 megatons of energy, but the Soviets feared its impact on their country, and on the entire planet in fact! In moments like these, everything was chaotic, and every possibility was possible, simply because no one had experienced this before.

Not only did the Tsar blow up, but between August 27 and September 1962, 3, the Soviet Union conducted a series of three nuclear weapons tests, in the same area where the "Tsar" was launched, called tests Nos. 173, 174 and 147, and each of these three explosions produced a force of 20 megatons.

On December 24, 1962, the Soviet Union conducted the so-called "test number 219" in the same area, and the output of this bomb was slightly less than half of the tsar, about 24.2 megatons. These five bombs — Caesar, Test No. 219 and Tests 173, 174 and 147 — are the most powerful nuclear explosions in human history.12 The main purpose of all these experiments was not war, but political, as the Soviets aimed to prove that their country was capable of producing such devices, and using them if it had to.

Despite many political and psychological complications, in essence it was nothing more than a race between two teams, but at a level that you have never seen before or imagined that it may exist mainly outside the scope of football or the hundred meters freestyle, for example, a race that Oppenheimer and his companions started about three-quarters of a century ago and has not yet stopped, and you can see this clearly in the nuclear threat during the Russians' current war with NATO in Ukraine.

In our world, there are about 12-18 thousand nuclear bombs, ready to be shipped, ready to be launched in moments, some of them hydrogen bombs that make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs just child's play, and although it is a low probability of nuclear war because each side knows that it is not only shooting at the enemies, but at itself because the enemy will respond before the strike reaches it, in the end it only requires a shaky decision from some angry men, and many more.

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Sources

  • 1- Tsar Bomba
  • 2- Soviet Tests
  • 3- Soviet Atomic Program – 1946
  • 4. Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988)
  • 5- Entering the Nuclear Arms Race: The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb, 1939-45
  • 6- Hydrogen Bomb – 1950
  • 7- What is the difference between a Hydrogen Bomb and an Atomic Bomb?
  • 8- Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) -RDS-6S
  • 9- Joe 6/RDS-37 1955 – Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan
  • 10- Operation Castle 1954 – Pacific Proving Ground
  • 11- Weapon Of Last Resort: How The Soviet Union Developed The World's Most Powerful Bomb
  • 12-The Top 10 Largest Nuclear Explosions, Visualized