#NUKE 10 WINDOWS#
So powerful was the blast, that windows were broken in Finland, some 900 kilometres away, and the shockwave travelled around the Earth three times. That’s something in the region of 3800 times more powerful than the bomb used against Hiroshima. When the bomb detonated, it was with the force of 50 million tonnes of high explosive. It wasn’t the most practical of weapons, but it allowed the Soviets to send a message about how good they’d gotten to be at making really big explosions. Not only that, but the bomb had to be carried to the ground by a parachute, to allow the aircraft to escape the very considerable blast zone. The bomb, which was known as “ The Tsar Bomb,” weighed in at a whopping 27 tonnes and required a specially modified Soviet heavy bomber to carry it.
The most powerful nuclear device ever constructed was detonated in the Arctic by the Soviet Union on October 30th, 1961. Further high-altitude detonations were temporarily banned after America and the Soviet Union both signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. Later in the same year, the Soviet Union detonated their own nuclear device in space. An electromagnetic pulse knocked out electrical services up to 1500 kilometres away, disrupted telephone service, set off burglar alarms, and damaged satellites. The night sky was lit up by the blast and glowed in blue, red and green. Once again the explosion turned out to be more powerful than had been expected. The device detonated in space at 11pm Honolulu time, on July 9th. However, The Honolulu Advertiser was rather more upbeat with its cheerful headline “Nuclear Blast Tonight May be Dazzling Good View Likely.” The test wasn’t without its controversy and brought forth protests across the globe. In an operation codenamed Operation Starfish Prime, a powerful hydrogen bomb was launched in the nose of a Thor rocket to detonate some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. In 1962, having given up on trying to blow up the moon, American scientists wanted to see what would happen if a nuclear bomb was exploded in space. Many of the documents around the project are still classified so we can’t be sure exactly why the project was abandoned, we can only be grateful that it was.
The secret project went by two names, the somewhat euphemistic “A Study of Lunar Research Flights,” and the more mysterious “ Project A119.” They would detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. hatched an ambitious plan intended to demonstrate their own military might. However, it was a symbol that the Soviets were technologically advanced and winning the space race. The Soviet satellite didn’t do a great deal, it just orbited the Earth every 98 minutes while emitting a beep audible to anyone with the equipment to pick it up. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 had American military chiefs worried. When Louis Reard came to look for a name for the two-piece bathing suit he had designed he decided to call it the bikini simply because people would recognise and remember the name. The resulting scandal inspired the film Godzilla, featuring a gigantic violent sea monster awoken by a nuclear explosion.Īs well as providing inspiration for giant atomic monsters, the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll also left their mark on the world of fashion. The bomb vaporised part of the island, left a mile-wide crater in the lagoon floor, and the radiation contaminated 23 crewmembers of a Japanese fishing vessel which had been fishing outside of the expected danger area. This turned out to be a problem, as it was twice as powerful as had been predicted. Most explosive of all was a hydrogen bomb detonated in 1954, which came very close to achieving 1,000 times as much explosive force as the bomb which had been dropped on Hiroshima.
The Bikini Islands in the Pacific Ocean were favoured by the United States to try out their latest nuclear toys, and between 19, 23 nuclear devices were tested there.
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