Big thing go boom! Watch Russian footage of the Tsar Bomba – the largest EVER nuclear bomb explosion recorded in history.
In fact, the Tsar Bomba is so big, it’s just earned itself an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the most powerful thermonuclear device ever used!
Weighing in with 50,000,000 tonnes of TNT, the ‘RDS-220’ (also known as the ‘Tsar Bomba’) was powerful enough to shatter windows in Norway and Finland after being dropped near the Arctic Ocean way back in 1961.
So why was this footage released at all?
Well, the footage was declassified by Russia’s ‘Rostatom State Atomic Energy Corporation’ to mark the 75th anniversary of the country’s nuclear industry – cute!
You can watch a shorter version of the footage below:
The longer footage of the bomb has been uploaded to YouTube by the organisation, in the form of a short film.
The first half hour is a propaganda-style mini documentary about the bomb’s development and construction, just to remind us how great Russia is at making bombs and stuff. Then, the real magic happens…
SOVIET 50 MEGATONS TSAR BOMBA TEST. DECLASSIFIED FOOTAGE https://t.co/cWjSxhlCr2 via @YouTube
— @LiamARyan01 (@LiamARyan01) June 1, 2021
Detonated from some 4,000 metres above the ground, Tsar Bomba’s impressive mushroom cloud reaches a whopping 42 miles into the air. To give you an idea of how massive that is, it’s seven times higher than Mount Everest.
In fact, the explosion is so big, you could see it from up to 620 miles away.
And that’s just the explosion!
The bomb itself is humungous, too, measuring at 26 feet in length and nearly 7 feet in height. In fact, it’s so big that the Soviet TU-95v bomber had to have several fuel tanks and the bomb bay doors removed just to make room in the plane!
And speaking of that plane, the shockwave enveloped from the explosion was so big it nearly killed the poor pilot, despite being 75 miles away.
Fortunately, they managed to recover and land the plane safely.
Prime 3AM youtube content is tsar bomba videos
— muro (@murochuu) April 4, 2021
If you’re interested to really get some scope about how much damage the Tsar Bomba could do, this video is definitely educational – if not slightly terrifying.
