TOP 10 most powerful nuclear explosions (10 photos)

Seventy years ago, on July 16, 1945, the United States conducted the first nuclear weapons tests in human history. Since that time, we have made a lot of progress: at the moment, more than two thousand tests of this incredibly destructive means of destruction have been officially recorded on Earth. Before you are ten of the largest explosions of nuclear bombs, each of which shook the entire planet.

Soviet tests No. 158 and No. 168
On August 25 and September 19, 1962, with a break of just a month, the USSR conducted nuclear tests over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Naturally, no video or photography was taken. It is now known that both bombs had a TNT equivalent of 10 megatons. The explosion of one charge would destroy all life within four square kilometers.


Castle Bravo
The world's largest nuclear weapon was tested at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. The explosion was three times stronger than the scientists themselves expected. The cloud of radioactive waste was carried towards the inhabited atolls, and numerous cases of radiation sickness were subsequently recorded among the population.


Evie Mike
This was the world's first test of a thermonuclear explosive device. The United States decided to test a hydrogen bomb near the Marshall Islands. Eevee Mike's detonation was so powerful that it simply vaporized the island of Elugelab, where the tests took place.


Castle Romero
They decided to take Romero out to the open sea on a barge and blow him up there. Not for the sake of any new discoveries, the United States simply no longer had free islands where it could safely test nuclear weapons. The explosion of Castle Romero amounted to 11 megatons of TNT. If a detonation had occurred on land, a scorched wasteland would have spread out around it within a radius of three kilometers.

Test No. 123
On October 23, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted a nuclear test code number 123. A poisonous flower of a 12.5 megaton radioactive explosion bloomed over Novaya Zemlya. Such an explosion could cause third-degree burns to people over an area of ​​2,700 square kilometers.


Castle Yankee
The second launch of the Castle series nuclear device occurred on May 4, 1954. The TNT equivalent of the bomb was 13.5 megatons, and four days later the consequences of the explosion hit Mexico City - the city was 15 thousand kilometers from the test site.


Tsar bomb
Engineers and physicists of the Soviet Union managed to create the most powerful nuclear device ever tested. The explosion energy of the Tsar Bomb was 58.6 megatons of TNT. On October 30, 1961, the nuclear mushroom rose to a height of 67 kilometers, and the fireball from the explosion reached a radius of 4.7 kilometers.


Soviet tests No. 173, No. 174 and No. 147
From September 5 to September 27, 1962, the USSR conducted a series of nuclear tests on Novaya Zemlya. Tests No. 173, No. 174 and No. 147 are in fifth, fourth and third places on the list of the strongest nuclear explosions in history. All three devices were equal to 200 megatons of TNT.


Test No. 219
Another test with serial number No. 219 took place there, on Novaya Zemlya. The bomb had a yield of 24.2 megatons. An explosion of such force would have burned everything within 8 square kilometers.


The Big One
One of America's biggest military failures occurred during the testing of the hydrogen bomb The Big One. The force of the explosion exceeded the power expected by scientists by five times. Radioactive contamination was observed across large parts of the United States. The diameter of the crater from the explosion was 75 meters deep and two kilometers in diameter. If such a thing fell on Manhattan, all that would be left of all of New York would be memories.