Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff. Lauren
Speaker 1: Vogel bomb here. On October thirtieth of nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: especially equipped Soviet long range bomber flew toward a remote
Speaker 1: chain of islands in the Arctic Ocean called Nova Zemia.
Speaker 1: It was a site that the Soviet Union often used
Speaker 1: for nuclear tests. The bomber was accompanied by a smaller
Speaker 1: plane equipped with the movie camera and instruments for monitoring
Speaker 1: air samples and nuclear fallout. But this wasn't a routine
Speaker 1: nuclear test. Attached to the underside of the plane was
Speaker 1: a thermonuclear bomb that was so big it wouldn't fit
Speaker 1: inside the plane's interior bomb bay. This cylindrical device was
Speaker 1: roughly the size of a bus twenty six feet long
Speaker 1: that's eight meters and nearly seven feet in diameter a
Speaker 1: little over two meters. It weighed nearly sixty thousand pounds
Speaker 1: that's twenty seven metric tons. The nuclear bomb had the
Speaker 1: prosaic name of Item six ZHO two, but it's gone
Speaker 1: down in history as the Tsar bomba, the Russian term
Speaker 1: for the emperor of nuclear bombs. That name was no exaggeration.
Speaker 1: Zar bombas yield is estimated to have been roughly fifty
Speaker 1: seven mega tons, which is about one thousand, five hundred
Speaker 1: times the combined power of the two atomic bombs that
Speaker 1: the US used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World
Speaker 1: War II. It's about ten times more powerful than all
Speaker 1: of the conventional explosions put off during World War II.
Speaker 1: On that day in October of nineteen sixty one, it
Speaker 1: was released on a parachute in order to slow its
Speaker 1: descent and give the bomber and observer planes time to escape.
Speaker 1: When it finally detonated about thirteen thousand feet or four
Speaker 1: kilometers above the ground. US was so powerful that it
Speaker 1: destroyed everything within a nearly twenty two mile radius that's
Speaker 1: thirty five kilometers, and generated a mushroom cloud that towered
Speaker 1: nearly two hundred thousand feet or sixty kilometers that's seven
Speaker 1: times taller than Mount Everest. Its fireball didn't actually touch
Speaker 1: the ground, but it expanded to a radius of about
Speaker 1: six miles in the air, which is about nine and
Speaker 1: a half kilometers, which would be enough to engulf pretty
Speaker 1: much any major city and out into the surrounding metro area.
Speaker 1: In Soviet towns, some one hundred miles or one hundred
Speaker 1: fifty kilometers from ground zero. Wooden houses were destroyed, and
Speaker 1: even brick and stone structures were damaged. Quirks of atmospheric
Speaker 1: pressure let the blast shatter windows over ten times that distance,
Speaker 1: thousands of miles away in Finland and Norway. The blast
Speaker 1: was so powerful that its shockwave caused the release plane
Speaker 1: to immediately drop some three thousand feet in altitude about
Speaker 1: a kilometer, though the pilot regained control and got the
Speaker 1: plane back to its base safely. A Soviet cameraman who
Speaker 1: recorded the event was later in the nineteen nineties interviewed
Speaker 1: for the Cold War International History Project Bulletin. The writers
Speaker 1: of that piece reported that he saw quote a powerful
Speaker 1: flash over the horizon, and after a long period of time,
Speaker 1: he heard a remote, indistinct and heavy blow, as if
Speaker 1: the earth had been killed. Sarbamba's test was symbolic of
Speaker 1: the escalating tensions between the USSR and the United States
Speaker 1: at the height of the Cold War. After a June
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one summit in Vienna between Soviet Premier and
Speaker 1: Nikita Khruschev and US President John F. Kennedy went badly.
Speaker 1: Khruztchev apparently decided to take out his frustrations by showing
Speaker 1: off their military prowess, including ending the informal moreitarium on
Speaker 1: nuclear testing that both countries had maintained since the late
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. The resumption of testing gave Soviet weapons researchers
Speaker 1: a chance to try out an idea they had for
Speaker 1: building a giant hydrogen bomb, a one that was far
Speaker 1: bigger than the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal
Speaker 1: atomic bombs included in the frightening logic of all out
Speaker 1: nuclear war. Having a high yield h bomb did make
Speaker 1: some sense theoretically at the time. Missiles capable of striking
Speaker 1: at distant countries were still in their infancy, and the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union didn't have many strategic bombers. The US, in contrast,
Speaker 1: had a variety of aircraft that could strike from bases
Speaker 1: dangerously close to Soviet territory. For the article this episode
Speaker 1: is based on, hastuff Work spoke via email with Nikolaisakov,
Speaker 1: a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and
Speaker 1: Non Proliferation. He explained, if you can only deliver one,
Speaker 1: two or three bombs, they better be very powerful. But
Speaker 1: the Soviet researchers pushed that idea to an extreme. They
Speaker 1: envisioned a hundred megaton weapon with a high level of radiation,
Speaker 1: but settled for testing one with only a little more
Speaker 1: than half of that explosive power. After their political leadership
Speaker 1: expressed worries about radioactive fallout from a larger blast. The
Speaker 1: decision to time the explosion a good bit above Earth's
Speaker 1: surface also worked in everyone's favor. The bomb's own shockwave
Speaker 1: helped repel its fireball further into the sky, Sakov said.
Speaker 1: As a result, fallout was very limited, much more limited
Speaker 1: than one could expect. The shockwave was really strong, however,
Speaker 1: it circumnavigated Earth three times. Even so, Japanese authorities found
Speaker 1: the highest level of radiation in rain water that they
Speaker 1: had ever detected, as well as an invisible cloud of
Speaker 1: radioactive ash that drifted eastward across the Pacific and then
Speaker 1: crossed Canada and the Great Lakes region. American scientists reassured
Speaker 1: the public that most of the radioactive fallout from Zar
Speaker 1: Bomba would stay high in the stratosphere and gradually lose
Speaker 1: its radioactivity by the time it fell to Earth. The
Speaker 1: Soviets informed the US beforehand of their intention to test
Speaker 1: day fifty megaton nuclear bomb. In a speech just a
Speaker 1: week before the blast, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell
Speaker 1: Gilpatrick suggested that the bomb wasn't intended to intimidate the
Speaker 1: United States, but to send a message to the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union's restless ally China. He said, perhaps this is also
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union's answer to the discordant voice from its
Speaker 1: populous neighbor to the south. Zar BOMBA made headlines in
Speaker 1: the US, but government officials didn't seem impressed by the
Speaker 1: nightmarish display of nuclear destruction. The US had concentric rings
Speaker 1: of defenses, from early warning radar to fighter aircraft and
Speaker 1: surface to air missiles that would have made it difficult
Speaker 1: for a Soviet bomber to succeed in a first strike,
Speaker 1: and a device as massive as the Zar BOMBA was
Speaker 1: dangerous to the aircraft that dropped it, so much so
Speaker 1: that the bomber crew had only been given a fifty
Speaker 1: to fifty chance of survival. Theoretically, there is no limit
Speaker 1: on how big hydrogen bombs can be. Hastuffworks also spoke
Speaker 1: via a mail with Robert Standish Norris, a senior fellow
Speaker 1: for Nuclear Policy at the Federation of American Scientists. He
Speaker 1: explained that the US a quote, looked into the big
Speaker 1: bomb option and decided no, if ever used, zar BOMBA
Speaker 1: would clearly kill a lot more people. Accuracy became an option,
Speaker 1: and if you improve it by half, you can cut
Speaker 1: the yield by a factor of eight. This is what
Speaker 1: we did, and the Soviets fall in that way. Tsar
Speaker 1: BOMBA ended up being a macab curiosity of the nuclear age.
Speaker 1: Hastiff Works also spoke by email Pavel Podvig, now a
Speaker 1: senior researcher in the Weapons of Mass Destruction program at
Speaker 1: the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He said, everybody
Speaker 1: understood that it is too big to be a practical weapon.
Speaker 1: From the point of view of destructive power. It's more
Speaker 1: efficient to use several smaller weapons than one large one.
Speaker 1: No additional devices of this kind were built. Instead, the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union went in a different direction. A few years
Speaker 1: after the SARBOMBA test, the Soviet missile designers achieved a
Speaker 1: major breakthrough with liquid fuel, opening the way to produce
Speaker 1: strategic missiles that could be kept ready for launch for
Speaker 1: extended periods and hidden in protected silos. No aircraft needed.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen seventies, only five percent of the Soviet
Speaker 1: nuclear arsenal was in the form of bombs that could
Speaker 1: be dropped by aircraft, Sakov said. About nineteen sixty four
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, the Soviet Union decisively turned toward an
Speaker 1: emphasis on ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can carry
Speaker 1: several warheads, each of which will strike a different target,
Speaker 1: which typically amounted to about two thirds of its strategic
Speaker 1: force until about the mid nineteen nineties, when it declined
Speaker 1: to roughly fifty percent. After Zarbamba's detonation, the head of
Speaker 1: the Soviet nuclear weapons program, physicist Andrey Sakrov, went on
Speaker 1: a personal campaign against the use and even testing of
Speaker 1: such weapons. He was exiled by his government, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his
Speaker 1: work in global human rights. Today, researchers still operate organizations
Speaker 1: like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to help educate
Speaker 1: and equip everyone one, from the public to policymakers about
Speaker 1: how to understand the existential threat that nuclear weapons represent.
Speaker 1: To learn more, check out the Bulletin dot org. They're
Speaker 1: not a sponsor, just a good organization. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: based on the article zarbomba the most powerful nuclear weapon
Speaker 1: ever built on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Patrick J. Higer.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with
Speaker 1: HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
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