No big, just some declassified Soviet test footage of the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated
Aux Features Russia
Another day, another reminder that it’s a goddamn miracle the human race has somehow survived this long. Last week, Rosatom—Russia’s state nuclear energy agency—released a previously classified 40-minute documentary delving into the development and testing of their legendary 50-megaton hydrogen bomb. It provides the public’s best, most comprehensive look to date at the RDS-220, a.k.a. the Tsar Bomba.
And it’s metal as hell.
Honestly, the thing that strikes us almost as strongly as witnessing a nuclear explosion 700 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima is just how thoroughly Soviet the documentary looks. The big, bold Cyrillic text, the upbeat, military orchestra soundtrack, the vintage video footage, that narrator’s chipper attitude that almost assuredly stems from knowing his country just hands-down won the nuclear arms race—it all seems almost too on-the-nose to be true. That could also just be us wishing that such a nihilistic death apparatus as the Tsar Bomba was a figment of our nightmares, but alas, it was very much a real thing.
But hey, maybe we’re not looking at this with the right lens. Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein described the declassified Soviet doc as “a nice addition” to the public body of knowledge, as if this were a new kitchen island installation on This Old House and not our starkest look yet at a machine that could kill God.
[via The New York Times]
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46 Comments
At least the pilots wore their safety goggles.
It’s kind of delightful how much this film is exactly like American military propaganda films of the same era.
I for one welcome our new Soviet overlords.
New Soviet overlords, same as the old Soviet overlords
In Soviet Union, overlords welcome you!
I don’t really have much to add so here’s a link to Tsar Bomba by Kung Fu:
Pretty sure they used this in The Americans.
Nice!
The plot twist: It was actually footage from 2020.I mean, would anybody really be shocked?
Equally unshocking scenario: Someone tells Putin they think Trump is starting to fall out of love with Russia. Putin responds “Oh, hell… I don’t know, show him a video of us blowing up a huuuuuuge bomb or something. I don’t care if it’s classified, whatever…”
What’s crazy to me is that it could have easily been a 100 MT bomb by replacing the lead tamper with uranium. That would have doubled the yield. But instead of giving the pilot a roughly 50% chance of getting far enough away to survive, it would have killed him, so they cut it back.-d
And to get even that 50% chance, a parachute had to be attached to the bomb to slow down the descent.
Russia is the same country that invented desant, where soldiers ride on top of a tank to use them as armor in WWII.
Meh. Beirut looked bigger.
Apropos of nothing, Russia would like to remind you:Russia Strong.
Strong like Bull!
https://yarn.co/yarn-clip/cdd03de9-2a29-42ef-9505-929a12e9be14
This Video is Private??? BOOOOOOO
Ha. “This video is Private”.
Here’s the bigger video, cued to the good bit:Love the organ jazz about a minute after the explosion.
Oh damn. The head of the mushroom is above the clouds. That’s amazing. Thanks for the link! I was bummed that I didn’t get to see it. The music cracked me up, too. Sounds like a cheap Casio keyboard. I couldn’t tell if the player was going for spooky or patriotic. Maybe spooky patriotism. It feels very much like a note where somebody said, “Can you throw some music in here? I’m worried that it’s going to scare the shit out of people…” and then the music makes it even more unsettling.
It’s the same organ music you hear in 50s B-movies when someone’s poking around a graveyard right before the foam rubber monster attacks.
“Omagersh Scoob! Like, the Ruskies have an H bomb! Oooh boy, we better let the gang know.” LOL!
Who’d’ve thought, Dr Strangelove was right in both the content and the soundtrack
Because it was a sexy explosion.
Shit, y’all. That’s big.
It would have been a private-first class video but its TIS and TIG didn’t meet qualifications.
You could see what the 100MT Tsar Bomba could have done to your town at:
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/Answer: It will fuck a whole lotta shit.
And it’s metal as hell.I mean, that’s probably why they wrote a song about it.
When you need subtitles for an English song. LOL!
… not a great song … but a song, nonetheless.
Great job, internet…
I myself decided long ago to stop worrying and love tsar bomba.
Did anybody grab this before it went private?
No but I got access in exchange for an emo-hamster mashup and some candid footage of people trying on shoes. It’s YouTube after all.
It’s just played for me, no problems.
Hamster Huey And The Gooey Kablooey really went OTT at the end there
Did they ever find his head?
I like how the Russian video states there were “several settlements nearby, but none recorded any event happening”. That’s because they’re all fucking dead from the fallout.Americans did theirs underground 10 years later in Alaska. It consisted of a 5 megaton-yield thermonuclear bomb, detonated in a 50-foot diameter chamber, at the bottom of a 5,875-foot shaft.
https://www.military.com/video/nuclear-bombs/nuclear-weapons/cannikin-nuclear-test-footage/1402452751001
Of course both the US and USSR did plenty of aboveground testing. When it is safe and responsible to go back to Vegas, check out the Atomic Testing Museum there besides the casinos. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the US used to do aboveground tests at the Nevada Test Site, so close to Vegas that people could see the mushroom clouds from the casinos. An untold number of people probably got dangerous amounts of radiation, including much of the cast and crew of the 1956 John Wayne movie The Conqueror who a couple of decades later died of cancer at a considerably higher rate than normal.
That is a great museum!
How many Roentgen?
An interesting recent timeline.Trump secretly meets with Putin.Nothing happens afterward.An obviously annoyed Kremlin soon issues a public statement basically saying “Ahem, remember we discussed ‘arms control’?” (something which nobody on the WH staff had heard of before)Trump hastily tears up the decades-old nuclear limitation treaty with Russia.Russia immediately fields a whole new class of nuclear-tipped terror weapons pointed at the US.On a related front, Trump just recently tore up the longstanding ‘no live nuclear testing’ agreement. Shall we hazard a guess whose going to take advantage of that first?
There is a significant and strong belief that most of the USSR’s actual nuclear arsenal was dismantled/never existed/fell into such decrepitude that while technically still a bomb couldn’t have reached the US. Without the SALT treaties to prohibit him from redeveloping new weapons Putin went on the offensive to modernize his dwindling nuclear resources which is a smart move if you’re basically looking to try to annex and destabilize yourself back to a relevant nuclear power. In all honesty, this is why opposing a nuclear Iran is sort of silly. India and Pakistan are more direct threats to world-ending apocalypse than the Iran-Russia regional power fight. Letting them proxy war it out by fighting each other would actually give the rest of the planet a chance to move on. They’re going to fight either way, you mind as well let them duke it out on a playing field where 80% of the population can sit back and chill.Really, the only actual reason the US opposed Iran’s nuclear program is Israel who felt threatened because they’ve got secret/not-secret nukes and wanted to be the only game in town. It won’t really matter either way as the whole ME becomes less economically viable by the minute as oil dwindles in practical value sooner and sooner.
Yeah, India and Pakistan are much more of a threat. Iran is basically like North Korea — they want the bomb just to say they have it and just having one bomb that could destroy one city (not even in the US, just a neighboring friendly country) would be enough to prevent regime change by the US. Whereas India and Pakistan are countries with crazy technical achievements — India has even sent spacecraft orbiting Mars and the Moon and has even tried to land an (unmanned) probe on the Moon.
there’s someone who looks like Sergei Korolev which is the scene from ‘Child 44’ where Noomi Rapace’s character realises “he shouldn’t have that book”
Does Vera Lynn sing at the end of this one?