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50 Years Ago The USSR Tested The Most Powerful H-Bomb
October, 30, 1961, the firing ground “New Land”. The most powerful in the history of humankind hydrogen bomb exploded. The prime aim of the bomb blasting was to show that the USSR possessed weapons of mass destruction of an unlimited power. At that time the most forceful nuclear fusion bomb tested by the USA was almost four times less powerless.
1954 – 1961, the USSR. The bomb, that immediately got several nicknames (“the Tsar-bomb”, or “Kuzka’s Mother”, Кузькина Мать, in Russian) was devised by a group of nuclear physicists under the guidance of Kurchatov. The explosive capacity was calculated to be 57 Mt in TNT equivalent.
The nuclear “mushroom” from the explosion amounted to 67 km high, the fireball was 4.6 km in radius. The burst wave rounded the globe 3 times; the atmosphere ionization caused radio interference within a radius of hundreds of kilometers. The witnesses felt the blast wave 1000 km apart, while the radiation potentially might have brought about third-degree burns at a distance of 100 km. The temperature of the ground under the hypocenter of the explosion was so high that the stones turned to ashes.
The last H-bomb testing in the history of the USSR took place on the 24th of October, 1990, at the Newland firing ground. Roughly in a year Boris Yeltsin declared a nuclear test moratorium. ("Arguments and Facts", October, 30, 2011, (12:34))
Should we remember this date or is it better to leave the shameful pages of the Soviet history behind?
I think we shouldn’t be blind to shameful sides of our history. In spite of the fact that it is not our contemporary government, that made the bomb exploded, it feels responsibility towards victims’ descendants. It happened, we cannot just reject it. We should remember so that it won’t happen again.
