Seventy years ago, on July 16, 1945, the United States conducted the first nuclear weapons test in human history. Since that time, we have managed to make a lot of progress: at the moment, more than two thousand tests of this incredibly destructive means of destruction have been officially recorded on Earth. Before you are a dozen of the largest explosions of nuclear bombs, from each of which the entire planet shuddered.
Soviet tests No. 158 and No. 168
On August 25 and September 19, 1962, with a break of only a month, the USSR conducted nuclear tests over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Naturally, no video or photography was carried out. It is now known that both bombs had a TNT equivalent of 10 megatons. The explosion of a single charge would destroy all life within four square kilometers.
Castle Bravo
On March 1, 1954, the largest nuclear weapon was tested on Bikini Atoll. The explosion was three times stronger than the scientists themselves expected. The cloud of radioactive waste was carried away towards the inhabited atolls; the population subsequently recorded numerous cases of radiation sickness.
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Evie Mike
This was the world's first test of a thermonuclear explosive device. The United States decided to test a hydrogen bomb near the Marshall Islands. Evie Mike's detonation was so powerful that it simply vaporized the island of Elugelab, where the tests were taking place.
Castle Romero
They decided to take Romero out to sea on a barge and blow it up there. Not for the sake of some new discoveries, it's just that the United States no longer had free islands where it could be safely tested nuclear weapons. The explosion of Castle Romero in TNT equivalent was 11 megatons. Detonation occurs on land, and a scorched wasteland within a radius of three kilometers would spread around.
Test No. 123
On October 23, 1961, the Soviet Union carried out a nuclear test under the code number 123. A poisonous flower of a radioactive explosion of 12.5 megatons blossomed over Novaya Zemlya. Such an explosion could cause third-degree burns in people in an area of 2,700 square kilometers.
Castle Yankee
The second launch of the Castle-series nuclear device occurred on May 4, 1954. The TNT equivalent of the bomb was 13.5 megatons, and four days later, the consequences of the explosion covered Mexico City - the city was 15 thousand kilometers from the test site.
Tsar bomb
The engineers and physicists of the Soviet Union managed to create the most powerful nuclear device ever tested. The energy of the Tsar Bomba explosion was 58.6 megatons in TNT equivalent. On October 30, 1961, a mushroom cloud rose to a height of 67 kilometers, and the fireball from the explosion reached a radius of 4.7 kilometers.
Soviet tests No. 173, No. 174 and No. 147
From 5 to 27 September 1962, a series of nuclear tests was carried out in the USSR on Novaya Zemlya. Tests No. 173, No. 174 and No. 147 are in fifth, fourth and third places in the list of the strongest nuclear explosions in history. All three devices were equal to 200 megatons of TNT.
Test No. 219
Another test with serial number 219 took place in the same place, on Novaya Zemlya. The bomb had an output of 24.2 megatons. An explosion of such force would have burned everything within 8 square kilometers.
The big one
One of America's biggest military failures happened during the tests of The Big One hydrogen bomb. The force of the explosion exceeded the power predicted by scientists five times. Radioactive contamination has been observed over a large part of the United States. The diameter of the explosion crater was 75 meters deep and two kilometers in diameter. If such a thing fell in Manhattan, then all of New York would be only memories.