You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. One civilian witness remarked that it was "as if the Earth was killed.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles. Over several minutes it rose and mushroomed into a massive cloud. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter-large enough to include the entire urban core of Washington or San Francisco, or all of midtown and downtown Manhattan. The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The sight was fantastic, unreal, and the fireball looked like some other planet. Behind it, like a funnel, the whole earth seemed to be drawn in. It grew larger and larger, and when it reached enormous size, it went up. A cameraman watching from the island recalled:Ī fire-red ball of enormous size rose and grew. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. Wellerstein gives a particularly vivid description of the Tsar Bomba detonation in his introduction:Īt 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. He described his conclusions in a fascinating article recently published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the test. Wellerstein has analyzed recently declassified documents pertaining to the US response to Tsar Bomba during the Kennedy administration. Advertisementįurther Reading Does nuclear secrecy make us secure? New book offers counterargument Kennedy opted for diplomacy, signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on October 7, 1963. But the Soviets' successful test lent greater urgency to the matter. The US had conducted the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb (codename: Ivy Mike) in 1954 and had been pondering the development of even more powerful hydrogen superbombs. The 60,000-pound (27 metric tons) test bomb's explosive yield was 50 million tons (50 megatons) of TNT, although the design had a maximum explosive yield of 100 million tons (100 megatons). Less well-known but equally significant from a nuclear arms race standpoint was the Soviet Union's successful detonation of a hydrogen "superbomb" in the wee hours of October 30, 1961.ĭubbed " Tsar Bomba" (loosely translated, "Emperor of Bombs"), it was the size of a small school bus-it wouldn't even fit inside a bomber and had to be slung below the belly of the plane. The detonation of the first nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is seared into our collective memory, and the world has been haunted by the prospect of a devastating nuclear apocalypse ever since.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |