Last week Russia released a documentary on the final hours of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear warhead ever detonated: ~3,330 times the size of the warhead that destroyed Hiroshima. It includes a considerable amount of never-before-seen footage of the bomb’s final testing and transport, the various monitoring locations, i’s flight to its testing site, and of course the detonation itself. It’s a fascinating, if a bit over the top at times, bit of history. It looks like it was put together in 1961 as a bit of internal propaganda. Footage from the chase plane is included. The damn thing was so big it had to be suspended under the fuselage of the carrier plane. It was transported to the airfield on a special built rail car that was essentially constructed around the bomb – it was too big to lift into a standard rail car.
I don’t speak Russian, but that narrator has such a soothing voice. Especially like how he says “bomba”. Add to that the pleasant music and all your worries blow away like so much radioactive dust.
In case you didn’t know, English captions can be enabled. When I first saw this video last week, I wasn’t aware of the captions but still watched quite a bit of it.
Yes, fission of a uranium tamper would have produced a stupid amount of radioactive fallout, as well as destroy the bomber in the resulting 100 megaton explosion, so they used a lead tamper instead. This resulted in a “clean” explosion with only 1.5 Mt of fission for a 50 Mt yield.
As nuclear weapons go, that’s extraordinarily clean. An airburst of the proper altitude probably would not have produced much fallout, as the fission products for that 3% of the yield would have been distributed through the whole mushroom cloud.