On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union delivered
perhaps the spookiest Halloween treat in history. 10km above the frozen, uninhabited island
of Severny, a Tu-95 piloted by Andrei Durnovtsev dropped a single bomb. Weighing approximately 27 tons, the device
fell for nearly one minute before detonating 4,000m above Mityushikha Bay. What followed was the biggest man-made blast
in history. The bomb exploded with a force 1,500 times
greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. In a split second, a fireball 8km across winked
into existence, before transforming into a mushroom cloud that reached the edge of space. The flash was visible a staggering 1,000km
distant. It’s said the explosion was ten times greater
than that of every single munition deployed in WWII combined. But what possessed the Soviets to build the
Tsar Bomba, and how did they come to choose obscure Severny as their proving ground? In the video today, we’re exploring the
history of both Severny island, and the Tsar Bomba: the most powerful nuke in history. A Land of Ice and Fire If you were to head north-east from Moscow
- across the frozen tundra - and keep going for almost 2,000km, you’d eventually come
to the Pechora Sea. Crossing this cold and icy sea, you’d land
at last on a chain of two desolate islands, together stretching over 1,000km north. Known as Novaya Zemlya, these two islands
are the textbook definition of inhospitable: lands of stark mountains, raging seas, and
endless fields of ice. At the very northern end, the second island
has temperatures that consistently hover around -16C. Most days, its shores are lost in fog. On clear days, they’re scoured by freezing
winds. The name of this beautiful, miserable, Godforsaken
place is Severny. Today, it’s famous for its wildlife, like
Arctic foxes and polar bears. But, in the middle of the last century, Severny
was infamous for something else. It’s here, some six decades ago, that Soviet
scientists tested the Tsar Bomba, the biggest superweapon mankind has ever seen. But the history of Severny itself starts far
earlier. First documented in Medieval times, Severny
is so remote and uninviting that nobody even bothered to explore it until the 18th Century. Even then, they didn’t settle it. That’s how inhospitable this island is:
even dudes who grew up in 1700s Siberia were all like “y’know what? Let’s leave this place for the polar bears”. In fact, Severny’s remoteness was so great
that no-one could even say for certain that it belonged to Russia. In the 19th Century, Norway began sending
vessels sniffing around, trying to see if they couldn’t swipe it. It was thanks to this that Severny got its
first permanent population. In the 1870s, Moscow decided to deter Norway
by colonizing the island. This being Imperial Russia, they didn’t
ask for volunteers but instead rounded up a bunch of indigenous Nenets people, dumped
them on Severny, and told them to get on with it. Which is how Severny came to house a few hundred
people surviving by hunting and fishing. But while those Nenets people would be able
to survive Severny’s harsh climate, their dislocated culture wouldn’t survive the
next great plan Moscow had for them. Over the next few decades, the world away
from the island changed beyond recognition. In Moscow, the tsar was overthrown, only to
eventually be replaced by a new kind of tsar: a walrus-moustached leader who imprisoned
and executed more than the tsar could’ve ever dreamed of. Known as Josef Stalin, it was under his watch
that the USSR was eventually dragged into WWII. And it was thanks to the endgame of this global
war that Severny’s fate was sealed. On July 16, 1945, at exactly 05:29am, a bright
red fireball appeared in the sky above the deserts of New Mexico. The Trinity Test was the first-ever detonation
of a nuclear bomb, the moment American scientists cracked the atom’s explosive secrets. Less than a month later, two of these superweapons
were dropped onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The levelling of two Japanese cities was an
awe-inspiring sight; awe-inspiring in the sense that it really did seem to evoke an
enraged, Old Testament God. Naturally, Tsar Walrus Chops wanted a piece
of that action. Barely was WWII over than Stalin was tasking
his sadistic right-hand man, Lavrentiy Beria, with building a bomb to rival Washington’s
new weapon. As work got underway, Beria visited the Lebedev
Institute at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. There, he asked the nuclear physics team for
volunteers. Of course, this being Beria, asking for “volunteers”
meant he told you to go and - if you didn’t - had you dragged into a freezing Moscow courtyard
and shot. So when Beria suggested to physicist Igor
Tamm that he join the new weapons program, you can bet your ass that Tamm said “Da.” But Tamm didn’t go alone. At the last moment, he asked his doctoral
student, Andrei D. Sakharov, to accompany him. It would be this decision that led to Severny’s
apocalypse. The Scientist and the Bomb Like many great scientists, Andrei Sakharov
started his life in relative anonymity. Born in Moscow on May 21, 1921, he was the
son of a physics teacher, who encouraged his interest in science. In fact, saying his dad encouraged him might
be an understatement. Sakharov’s father delighted in nothing more
than seeing his son run homemade experiments while other kids were outside playing. By 1938, this science-based childhood had
evidently rubbed off. Sakharov enrolled at Moscow University to
study physics. Not that he would physically be in Moscow
when he graduated. In summer, 1941, Nazi Germany came steamrollering
into the Soviet Union, and Sakharov and his classmates were evacuated to modern-day Turkmenistan. It was in this empty outpost of the USSR that
Sakharov got his degree. By then, it was already so clear he was destined
for greatness that he was exempted from military service. Come the end of the war, Sakharov returned
to Moscow. There, he got a placement under renowned physicist
Igor Tamm at the Lebedev Institute. He was still there two years later when Beria
came sniffing around for “volunteers”. the Truman Doctrine of containing Communism
was official US policy. That meant money was no object regarding Beria’s
offer. Sakharov and Tamm would have funding and prestige
far beyond their wildest dreams. On the other hand, if they messed up then
it would be straight into one of those freezing Moscow courtyards, and then straight into
a shallow grave. Luckily, Sakharov was so skilled at nuclear
physics that messing up simply wasn’t an option. On 29 August, 1949, a mushroom cloud rose
into the air above the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. It was the USSR’s first successful nuclear
detonation. With a yield of 22 kilotons, it was equal
to anything in the American arsenal. Sakharov was there that day to witness the
blast. It’s likely he felt a surge of pride watching
the fireball light up the sky. What Sakharov couldn’t have known was that
the Americans were about to go one better. In January, 1950, President Harry Truman announced
that his nation was working on a new kind of atomic bomb, which he called a “hydrogen
or superbomb.” In Moscow, Beria was briefed on Truman’s
speech. Shortly after, another of his offers you couldn’t
refuse landed on Sakharov and Tamm’s desk. “Hey guys!” It basically said, “loved your work on the
a-bomb. But how about moving a few letters up in the
alphabet and getting started on an h-bomb, huh? And make it fast, OK, otherwise I might have
to tell Stalin that we need some new nuclear physicists. Kisses!” Within days, Sakharov had been sent to the
Arzamas-16 nuclear facility some 450km from Moscow to try and crack the riddle of the
hydrogen bomb. It was while there that Sakharov made his
history-changing breakthrough. Sakharov designed what’s been called “a
layered fission-fusion-fission device”, essentially a nuclear bomb in which one layer’s
chain reaction would ignite another chain reaction in the layer above, and so-on until
you got the mother of all bangs. Sakharov named his breakthrough sloika or
“layer cake”. Once it had been perfected, it would be capable
of delivering a bomb so big it would dwarf anything the world had ever seen. The Nuclear Race The next couple of years would see the world
engage in the biggest, most-dangerous arms race in history. On October 3, 1952, Britain joined the nuclear
club with a successful detonation in Australia, taking the number of atomic states to three. Less than a month later, on November 1, the
US tested its first hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands. So far in this video, we’ve talked about
yields in kilotons - with 15 kilotons being the size of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. Well, America’s Ivy Mike test debuted at
a staggering ten and a half megatons. Imagine the insane amount of damage the Hiroshima
bomb did. Now scale it up by roughly 700 times, and
you have Ivy Mike. It was simply on another scale, an explosion
beyond anything the Soviets could have ever dreamed of. At least, that’s what the Americans believed. They didn’t know that Andrei Sakharov was
already dreaming even bigger than they were. In early 1953, Tamm returned to Moscow, and
Sakharov was made head of the entire Soviet h-bomb project. By now, the scientist was obsessed with cracking
the thermonuclear problem. He didn’t even need the motivation of Beria
breathing down his neck. We know this because the death of Stalin in
March and Beria’s subsequent fall from grace and execution didn’t slow Sakharov’s work
in the slightest. Come summer, he was finally ready. On August 8, 1953, temporary Soviet premier
Georgy Malenkov announced to the world that the US no longer had a monopoly on hydrogen
weapons. Four days later, Sakharov showed them what
that meant. The detonation of Joe-4 - the disparaging,
American name the first Soviet hydrogen bomb was given - caused an explosion equivalent
to 400,000 tons of TNT. Although this was a mere fraction of what
Ivy Mike had achieved - barely a rounding error in American terms - it was still the
biggest bomb the Soviets had yet tested. After the mushroom cloud had faded, Sakharov
was rewarded with the title “Hero of Socialist Labor”, the highest civilian award in the
USSR. But while the motherland may have been impressed
with his achievements, the Americans were still lightyears ahead. In March, 1954, the Castle Bravo test blew
over Bikini Atoll. A 15 megaton monster, it vaporized three whole
islands, turned the sky to fire, and made observers a whole 50km away feel like someone
was applying a blowtorch to their faces. It was the biggest bomb Washington would ever
detonate. For the Soviets, it was now imperative they
also break the megaton limit. They finally made it a year later. In November, 1955, Sakharov traveled to the
Semipalatinsk test site to observe the USSR’s biggest nuke yet. Flying over the frozen Kazakh steppe, the
scientist pondered the view below. The way the “dark, turbulent waters of the
Irtysh, dotted with a thousand whirlpools, bore the milky-blue ice floes northward, twisting
them around and crashing them together.” “Nature was displaying its might” he later
said, “compared to it, all man’s handiwork seems paltry imitation.” But there would be nothing paltry about Sakharov’s
latest slice of layer cake. On November 22, a one-and-a-half megaton device
was dropped from a plane over Semipalatinsk. When it exploded, a blinding flash bleached
the landscape, followed by a shockwave that knocked people off their feet. But while Sakharov’s initial feeling on
seeing the detonation was one of great achievement, it soon curdled into something much more sour. The force of the bomb had collapsed small
buildings across the region. A trench had fallen down on soldiers watching
the blast; a crude bomb shelter had collapsed on villagers living nearby; and a hospital
roof had caved in on a ward full of patients. The end result was 47 people with serious
injuries, and two dead: a young soldier and a two year-old Kazakh girl. It was Sakharov’s first encounter with the
consequences of such awesome weapons. As he wrote later: “I experienced… a fear that this newly
released force could slip out of control and lead to unimaginable disasters. The accident reports, and especially the deaths
of the little girl and the soldier, heightened my sense of foreboding... I could not escape a feeling of complicity.” But there was no time for the scientist to
start questioning his commitment to the Soviet nuclear program now. That same year, the Nenets people of Severny
Island were all evacuated onto the Russian mainland. Moscow had just chosen the site of its newest
proving ground. Building the Bomba After Castle Bravo, America had a change of heart. Out went building bigger and bigger nukes. In came building smaller bombs that could
be placed on highly-accurate missiles. But the Soviets hadn’t had their Castle
Bravo yet. The dream was still to build a bomb bigger
than anything the Americas could hope to match. That dream finally came to fruition in July,
1961. Seen through a narrow lens, this might seem
like a strange time for the Tsar Bomba to be built. Since 1958, the USA, USSR, and UK had been
observing an unofficial moratorium on nuclear testing - albeit one that had been interrupted
by the French detonating their first atomic bomb in 1960. But when you look at the wider picture, it
suddenly starts to make a lot more sense. In mid-1961, the Bay of Pigs Invasion had
just happened. The US was busy installing nuclear missiles
in Turkey, just over the USSR’s border. In a handful of weeks, the Berlin Wall would
go up. In short, it was a tense time, one during
which Moscow was feeling hemmed in and threatened. Which may be why Khrushchev summoned Sakharov
on July 10, 1961. At the meeting, he ordered the scientist to
start work on the biggest bomb he’d ever built. Something that would make Castle Bravo look
like a wet fart. There was just one catch. The bomb would have to be ready to test by
the end of the Twenty Second Party Congress. That meant Sakharov had just sixteen weeks
to design and build a superweapon that would make God himself tremble. If he didn’t… well, these were the Khrushchev years. No-one got shot in courtyards anymore. But they did lose their jobs. They did get publicly disgraced and driven
from their homes. It may have been lenient compared to anything
Beria might have done, but it was still enough to make sure Sakharov worked his ass off. The pressure on the scientist must’ve been
immense. But it worked. Before long, Sakharov unveiled the scariest
blueprint in history. The Big Bomb would be another classic slice
of layer cake, this time with three layers that would seriously interact with one another. When Sakharov’s team ran the figures, they
calculated their bomb would have a yield of not one megaton; not ten megatons… But one hundred megatons. OK, so remember the Castle Bravo shot that
vaporized those three islands? Well, that was fifteen megatons, about 1,000
times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. Sakharov’s Big Bomb would be 3,000 times
the size of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It would dwarf Castle Bravo, a bomb that had
burned flesh 50km from ground zero. In fact, it would be so big that Sakharov
worried it might be too big. With an explosion in the 100 megaton range,
no-one knew what would happen. Sakharov became haunted by visions of the
whole of northern Russia being swamped with radiation. At the last minute, with the test day fast
approaching, the scientist balked. He had the uranium layers in his sloika replaced
with lead, effectively halving the Big Bomb’s yield. It’s this smaller version that would become
known as the Tsar Bomba, that would soon be dropped on Severny. But smaller here is a relative concept. When Sakharov’s Tsar Bomba blew, it would
still be with enough force to shake the entire world. Detonation Day On the morning of October 30, 1961, a heavy
plane took off from Russia’s Kola Peninsula, near the border regions with Finland. The Tu-95 bomber was piloted by vetern flier
Andrei Durnovtsev. But it was unlike any bomber he’d flown
before. For one, its bomb bay doors had been removed,
and the plane’s outside painted a bright, reflective white. For another, strapped to its underside was
the biggest bomb the world had ever seen. The finished Tsar Bomba was an incredible
8 meters long, and weighed more than 27 tonnes. It had a giant parachute attached to it weighing
an additional ton. The plan was that this would slow the bomb’s
fall, giving Durnovtsev time to speed away from the blast. Even so, the flight crew’s chances of survival
had been calculated at no more than fifty percent. The 1,000km flight took the plane over frigid
waters. At long last, a strip of barren, frozen land
appeared on the horizon. It was the island of Severny: the Tsar Bomba’s
final target. At slightly past 11:30am, Moscow time, Major
Durnovtsev piloted his Tu-95 over Mityushikha Bay. At a height of 10km, he pressed the release
button. Below, the massive Tsar Bomba dropped, falling
silently as Durnovtsev sped away. The device fell for almost one minute, an
angel of death, serenely tumbling toward the ground. At 11:32am, at precisely 3,940m above the
island, it detonated. The Tsar Bomba explosion was like nothing
the world had ever seen. In the barest fraction of a second, a fireball
8km wide appeared in the sky over Severny. The flash that accompanied it was so bright,
it could be seen over 1,000km away. In an instant, a mushroom cloud 64km high
had formed - seven times taller than Mt Everest. Its top stretched 100km from end to end. Within split seconds, the blast was radiating
outwards, traveling at incomprehensible speeds across Russia. 55km from the hypocenter, the abandoned Nenets
village of Severny - named after the island it was built on - was completely obliterated. 100km away, all animals out in the open had
their flesh ignite, searing them with third degree burns. 160km away - about the distance from New York
City to Philadelphia - wooden buildings were knocked flat, while brick buildings had their
roofs swept away. About 250km away, any living thing looking
directly at the blast suffered serious eye damage. By 700km away - now about the distance from
Manhattan to Quebec City - windowpanes shattered, spraying people stood near them with glass. The shockwave of the Tsar Bomba was ultimately
felt all the way to Finland. In British terms, this would be like a bomb
in central London causing tremors in Prague. In the air close to Ground Zero, Andrei Durnovtsev’s
plane was almost knocked out the sky, plummeting 1,000 meters before he managed to regain control. One of the observers onboard would later write: “At that moment, our aircraft emerged from
between two cloud layers and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging. The ball was powerful and arrogant like Jupiter. Slowly and silently it crept upwards... Having broken through the thick layer of clouds
it kept growing. It seemed to suck the whole Earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.” The blastwave of the Tsar Bomba circled the
Earth three times. Despite blowing 4km in the air, it set off
seismographs across Russia, registering as a 5.0 quake. It was simply one of the biggest bangs in
history. When Mt St Helens erupted in 1980, it was
roughly half the size of the Tsar Bomba. The detonation knocked out all radio communication
over northern Russia for the best part of an hour. By the time it was reestablished, the entire
world was aware of what had happened. The Soviets had just detonated the biggest
nuke in history. And now the world was determined to make sure
it never happened again. Aftermath One of the interesting things about the Tsar
Bomba is that, despite its raw power, it was effectively useless. Such a destructive bomb was far too big to
be loaded onto a missile. Any bomber it was attached to would be moving
so slowly that it wouldn’t even make it to Western Europe - let alone America - before
being shot down. It was a propaganda event, pure and simple. A way for Khrushchev to allow himself a sly
little smile any time the Americans mentioned Castle Bravo. But in the 1960s, no-one saw it that way. The outrage the Tsar Bomba generated was probably
almost as explosive as the Tsar Bomba itself. The test was too powerful. At this size, scientists were messing with
forces so far beyond their control that a single slip might irradiate an entire hemisphere. Along with lingering memories of Castle Bravo,
it was outrage at the Tsar Bomba that helped push through the atmospheric test ban in 1963,
driving nuclear weapons tests underground. Even then, no-one would ever again test anything
of comparable size. Interestingly, one of those driven to action
in the wake of the Severny test was Andrei Sakharov. Faced with the awesome power of his bomb - and
knowing it could’ve been twice as big - the nuclear physicist had his Oppenheimer moment. But while Oppenheimer merely felt in his soul
the awful, God-like power of his work, Sakharov became determined to do something about it. Starting in 1963, he began to agitate for
a full ban on nuclear weapons. Eventually, he got so vocal that he was removed
from his position. When that didn’t work, the USSR relocated
him to a remote, miserable town in the middle of nowhere, and hounded him day and night. Sakharov was only allowed to finally return
to Moscow in the mid-1980s, as part of Gorbachev’s thaw. He died on December 14, 1989, his goal of
a world without nuclear weapons still a distant dream. And what of Severny itself? Is it now a radioactive wasteland; a Chernobyl
of the frozen north? Well, no, not at all. Despite being really, really big, the Tsar
Bomba was one of the cleanest ever detonations, leaving very little radioactive material behind. Yet, Severny remains uninhabited. The Nenets people never returned to rebuild
their destroyed villages. The only signs of life today are a Russian
military base and a weather station. Oh, and the occasional tourists who come to
hike in the beautiful, remote wastes of Severny’s national park. But while the physical evidence of the Tsar
Bomba may be gone, its memories still linger. Although it would seem unbelievable to someone
standing on Severny now, it was here - at this very place - that mankind came closest
to building a superweapon to rival God. In a single flash of light, we showed once
and for all our ability to annihilate ourselves, to end all life with the push of a button. It’s a terrifying power… and the worst
part is, we still have it. It’s estimated there are roughly 14,000
nukes still in existence around the world. None of them may be capable of a 50 megaton
blast, but they are all still incredibly destructive. It’s chilling to think that the era of nuclear
explosions may not yet be over. That, in ten, fifty, or a hundred years, our
descendants may be looking back on a bomb so big, it could make even the Tsar Bomba
seem small. The story in today’s video may be finished,
but the story of humanity’s weapons of mass destruction will likely never end. All we can do is repeat the prayer Andrei
Sakharov once offered, after seeing his first h-bomb test: ““May all of our devices explode as successfully
as today’s… but always over test sites and never over cities.”
