![]() ![]() I was really pleased with how the render came out fortunately, bomb casings are pretty easy to render as 3D models (they are essentially just deformed cylinders, and are basically symmetrical). These are bomb casings the size of small school buses. On the right are the “superbombs”: the Tsar Bomba, of course, but also the BTV and Flashback Test Vehicle, which represented different approaches to Tsar Bomba-range yields by the United States. ![]() On the left are the biggest bombs (for their eras) that the US deployed, showing how dramatically the US was able to steadily pack megatons into less mass/volume over time. And, as discussed previously on the blog, Edward Teller had long been interested in, as he put it in a classified meeting in 1954, “the possibility of bigger bangs” - weapons in the range of many gigatons.Ī rendering I made (in Blender) showing the relative size of various “superbomb” bomb casings (and a little silhouette of me, for scale). I contextualize this within US nuclear thinking about “very high yield” weapons, which goes back as far as 1944, but was extremely prevalent in the late 1950s, when the US pursued a 60-Mt bomb with some enthusiasm. Privately, in secret, it explored very seriously the idea of making 50-100 Mt bombs, and contemplated even higher yields (1,000 Mt and up). Publicly, the US denounced the weapon, declared it pointless and exclusively political in nature, and said it didn’t need such things. The article then segues into the second history: the US response to the Tsar Bomba, and this is based on documents I’ve been collecting for a decade or more. And I also stumble across some very interesting details about the internal design of the Tsar Bomba (it appears to have had two primaries, one at either end of the casing - this was totally surprising to me, since the common wisdom is that multiple primaries would be almost impracticably hard to synchronize). You can read the article for more, but I tried to write the history of the Tsar Bomba the way we would write the history of an American bomb development - not by just constantly pointing out the idiocy of the people involved, but trying to describe what they did within the context of their time and thinking. This account comes from the head of the documentary crew Vladimir Suvorov, who wrote a memoir ( Strana Limoniya) in 1989, and is just one of the many Russian-language memoirs and official histories I used to pull together this new account (it is linked to in the BAS article’s footnotes). They were given exactly 20 minutes to shoot it. The military did not want spotlights to be used while they did this, but the filmmakers charged with making the documentary about it explained they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see it. 1Īttaching of the Tsar Bomba to the belly of its bomber in the still-dark hours before the test. This work involves scientists who are important to the Soviet H-bomb project but a lot less famous than Sakharov, notably Yuri Trutnev (who recently died) and Yuri Babaev. Later, in 1961, the Arzamas-16 scientists decided that they could use their by then much more advanced H-bomb tech (they had a breakthrough in 1958 called Project 49, which seems to have really improved their efficiency) to make a 100-megaton bomb in the same casing as before (RDS-602). This plan got scrapped, but the casing was kept in storage. ![]() Of course, it’s hard to do that with the sources available in English, but a veritable bounty of internal histories and memoirs were produced in Russia at the end of the Cold War, and many of these are now (thanks to the Internet) very easily accessible (if you can read enough Russian to navigate them).įor example, the massive casing of the Tsar Bomba was developed for a totally different design in 1956 (RDS-202), which was just the stock H-bomb technology at the time with more fuel (it was an RDS-37 with enough fuel to get 20-30 megatons). I wanted to make it something like a real history, with its deeper context. They’re about Soviet posturing and a little bit about Sakharov racing to complete the bomb, but I was really taken with the accounts one gets when reading Russian-language sources, which not only paint a much more colorful and human picture, but fill in a lot of interesting details. Everyone who knows about nukes has heard about the Tsar Bomba, but the histories of it in English have always had a sort of sketchy, judge-y quality to them. The first is about the development of the famous “Tsar Bomba,” the 100-megaton monster bomb tested (at half-power) on October 30, 1961. The article is really two intertwined histories. Special thanks to their multimedia editor, Thomas Gaulkin, for the nearly all-nighter I suspect he put in on this. I had really wanted this article to be a visual feast, and I’m super pleased with how the Bulletin presented it. ![]()
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