I saw this on Monday as I was reading on http://www.fark.com/. It was an interesting story. I thought that some of my readers might like it. This just illustrates how disastrous an "All Out Nuclear War" Could have been.
Tsar Bomba
Russian: Царь-бомба, literally "Emperor Bomb" is the Western name for the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb of about 50 megatons was codenamed Ivan by its developers.
The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, in Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Sea. The device was scaled down from its original design of 100 megatons to reduce the resulting nuclear fallout.
The Tsar Bomba was a three-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons. A three-stage H-bomb uses a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary, as in most H-bombs, and then uses energy from the resulting explosion to compress a much larger additional thermonuclear stage. The initial three-stage design was capable of approximately 100 Mt, but at a cost of too much radioactive fallout. To limit fallout, the third stage, and possibly the second stage, had a lead tamper instead of a uranium-238 fusion tamper (which greatly amplifies the reaction by fissioning uranium atoms with fast neutrons from the fusion reaction). This eliminated fast fission by the fusion-stage neutrons, so that approximately 97% of the total energy resulted from fusion alone (as such, it was one of the "cleanest" nuclear bombs ever created, generating a very low amount of fallout relative to its yield). There was a strong incentive for this modification since most of the fallout from a test of the bomb would fall on populated Soviet territory.
Have a look at this comparison of nuclear bombs, starting with the "microscopic" Hiroshima bomb:
Tsar Bomba
Russian: Царь-бомба, literally "Emperor Bomb" is the Western name for the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb of about 50 megatons was codenamed Ivan by its developers.
The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, in Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Sea. The device was scaled down from its original design of 100 megatons to reduce the resulting nuclear fallout.
The Tsar Bomba was a three-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons. A three-stage H-bomb uses a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary, as in most H-bombs, and then uses energy from the resulting explosion to compress a much larger additional thermonuclear stage. The initial three-stage design was capable of approximately 100 Mt, but at a cost of too much radioactive fallout. To limit fallout, the third stage, and possibly the second stage, had a lead tamper instead of a uranium-238 fusion tamper (which greatly amplifies the reaction by fissioning uranium atoms with fast neutrons from the fusion reaction). This eliminated fast fission by the fusion-stage neutrons, so that approximately 97% of the total energy resulted from fusion alone (as such, it was one of the "cleanest" nuclear bombs ever created, generating a very low amount of fallout relative to its yield). There was a strong incentive for this modification since most of the fallout from a test of the bomb would fall on populated Soviet territory.
Have a look at this comparison of nuclear bombs, starting with the "microscopic" Hiroshima bomb:
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