Tsar Bomba: Russia's Quest to Create the Most Destructive Nuclear Weapon in History and the Explosion it Caused
The explosion creates a bright red and orange fireball that is five miles wide in diameter--a mini manmade flaming sun. This fireball is visible to the naked eye from over six-hundred miles away. In the seconds after the explosion a giant mushroom cloud over forty-two miles high, eight times the size of Mount Everest, reaches all the way into the stratosphere. A witness, commissioned by the Soviet Union as a cameraman to document the event, and flying in an observation aircraft some fifty miles from the detonation described what he witnessed years later by saying, “Slowly and silently the fireball crept upwards. Having broken through the thick layer of clouds it kept growing…it seemed to suck the whole earth into it. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, spectacular.” It is October 30, 1961 in the skies over the Soviet Union on the edge of the Arctic Circle and this is the test detonation of the “Tsar Bomba” or “Tsar’s Bomb”--the largest and most powerf...