response to a nuclear first strike from the Soviet Union was automated, especially detection of unknown radar contacts approaching the U.S. Strategic defenses in the Cold War were built up of concentric rings of distant early warning radars, air defense fighters, long range anti-aircraft missiles with nuclear warheads like the CIM-10C BOMARC and a series of decreasing range nuclear and conventionally armed surface-to-air missiles (SAMS) like the Nike Hercules and Nike Ajax. Because of its size, it was carried partially outside of its specially-modified Tu-95 called the “Tu-95V”.Ī weapon like Tsar Bomba would have been difficult for the Soviet Union to deploy in a first strike nuclear attack on America. Tsar Bomba was so enormous, 8m (26ft) long with a diameter of almost 2.6m (7ft) and weighing an unbelievable 54,000 pounds, that it dwarfed America’s largest nuke, the puny 9-megaton B53 air delivered bomb weighing in at “only” 8,850 pounds. As Russia vaults ahead in a promising new era the country has been increasingly willing to disclose its shadowy past, and the new film of Tsar Bomba underscores how lethal aspects of the Cold War truly became.īut the new Tsar Bomba film raises an interesting question could a bomb of this size have ever been used by the Soviet Union against the United States? The answer is: maybe. The film becomes available as Russia has undergone significant advancement since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This year, new film of the only test of Tsar Bomba was released from Russia. on Jduring the Trinity tests of the Manhattan Project, and continues to this day.īut the tipping point of the balance of terror maintained between the Soviet Union and the United States reached its apogee on the day that Tsar Bomba was tested, and this test underscored the accelerating insanity of nuclear proliferation and the concept of “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “MAD” that kept both sides from pushing the nuclear button. Tsar Bomba was the ultimate and most terrifying manifestation of the nuclear era, an age that began with the first nuclear detonation by the U.S. Even the Soviets were surprised by how powerful the enormous bomb was. The bomb was dropped from a specially modified Tupolev Tu-95, NATO Codename “Bear”, a unique swept-wing, four-engine turboprop still in service today that flew for the first time in 1952, the same year as America’s B-52 Stratofortress.Įvery statistic about Tsar Bomba’s destructive power is difficult to grasp. Tsar Bomba was detonated over the remote Novya Zemlya area, on a desolate archipelago called Mityushikha Bay test range, test field D-2, Novaya Zemlya Island, that juts into the Barents Sea in the former Soviet Union.
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