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.
Although a success, Tsar Bomba was never considered for operational use. Given its size, the device could not be deployed by a ballistic missile.
“Emperor” remained the official title for subsequent Russian rulers, but they continued to be known as “tsars” in popular usage until the imperial regime was overthrown by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, was executed by the Soviet government in 1918.
It's theoretically possible to build a nuclear bomb more than 100 times as powerful as Tsar Bomba, but it wouldn't at all be practical. Thanks to bans on nuclear testing and an enlightened realization that nuclear weapons existentially endanger all life on Earth, it's unlikely that we would ever see such a thing.
The UR-500 ICBM was successfully tested but never deployed, with it being further developed into the famous Proton rocket. Therefore, Russia has a weapon that is almost twice as deadly as the Tsar Bomba, as well as an ICBM to use it.
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.
As far as we know, nobody currently has a Tsar Bomba. The Soviets only built the one that was detonated in 1961.
The Tsar Bomba packed a punch of over 50 megatons, which is the equivalent of 50 million tons of conventional explosives. That's 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War Two and over 1,500 times the force of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
But assuming every warhead had a megatonne rating, the energy released by their simultaneous detonation wouldn't destroy the Earth. It would, however, make a crater around 10km across and 2km deep. The huge volume of debris injected into the atmosphere would have far more widespread effects.
Depending on its impact radius, even a Tsar bomb cannot destroy a whole country. Only a small country such as Vatican City or Monaco with land areas of 44 ha and 202 ha respectively can be completely destroyed using a nuclear weapon.
On October 30, 1961, Tsar Bomba was detonated in the atmosphere at 11:32 Moscow Time over the Mityushikha Bay Nuclear Testing Range in the northern Arctic Circle. The bomb was set by barometric sensors to detonate at 13,000 feet and was dropped from a height of 34,000 feet.
A new video simulates the explosion of thermal nuclear weapons in the Challenger Deep. Tsar Bomba is the most powerful nuclear bomb ever made. One bomb would be stanched, but a million could easily destroy the Earth.
The smallest U.S. nuclear weapon ever developed, the W-54, had a minimum yield of “only” 10 tons of TNT equivalent (0.01 kilotons) and could be carried by a single soldier in an (awkwardly large) backpack.
On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted an atmospheric test of the largest thermonuclear weapon ever created: The Tsar Bomba.
The mushroom cloud was 25 miles wide at its base and almost 60 miles wide at its top. At 40 miles high, it penetrated the stratosphere. Everything within three dozen miles of the impact was vaporized, but severe damage extended to 150 miles radius—enough to entirely annihilate any modern major city, including suburbs.
The initial blast would have decimated the entire city and everything within 12 miles. The mushroom cloud, with a radius of 29.5 miles, would have stretched all the way into Washington D.C. The heat from the blast would have extended out 62 miles, and would have left everyone in Dover, Delaware with third-degree burns.
One civilian witness remarked that it was “as if the Earth was killed.” Decades later, the weapon would be given the name it is most commonly known by today: Tsar Bomba, meaning “emperor bomb.” A still frame from a once-secret Soviet documentary of the Tsar Bomba nuclear test, released by Rosatom in August 2020.
Tsar Bomba's mushroom cloud breached through the stratosphere to reach a height of over 37 miles (60km), roughly six times the flying height of commercial aircraft. The two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had devastating consequences, and their explosive yields were only a fraction of the 10 largest explosions.
All of these are valuable sources of scientific information, which helped the researchers determine the size of the volcanic eruption. 'The eruption was equivalent to around 61 Mt of TNT, whereas the Tsar Bomba released between 50-58 Mt,' said Dr Rigby.
A nuclear device no larger than a conventional bomb can devastate an entire city by blast, fire, and radiation. Since they are weapons of mass destruction, the proliferation of nuclear weapons is a focus of international relations policy.
A hydrogen bomb has never been used in battle by any country, but experts say it has the power to wipe out entire cities and kill significantly more people than the already powerful atomic bomb, which the U.S. dropped in Japan during World War II, killing tens of thousands of people.
A single nuclear weapon can destroy a city and kill most of its people. Several nuclear explosions over modern cities would kill tens of millions of people. Casualties from a major nuclear war between the US and Russia would reach hundreds of millions.
If you dropped a nuclear bomb into the crater of an extinct volcano, you would flatten the mountain out a bit but you wouldn't set the volcano off because there wouldn't be any pre-existing upwelling of magma.