Tsar Bomba (Царь-бомба, literally "Emperor Bomb") is the Western name for the RDS-220 hydrogen bomb (codenamed "Ivan" by its developers) — the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT; however that was reduced by half in order to limit the amount of nuclear fallout that would result. Two bombs were built, a mock bomb and the real bomb, with the real bomb being tested on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.The mock bomb was stored in the Russian Nuclear Weapons Museum in Sarov.




The Tsar Bomba was the culmination of a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapons designed by the USSR and U.S. during the 1950s (examples include the Mark-17[11] and B41). Such bombs were designed because:

* The nuclear bombs of the day were large and heavy, regardless of yield, and could only be delivered by strategic bombers. Hence yield was subject to dramatic economies of scale;
* It was feared that many bombers would fail to reach their targets because their size and low speed made detection and interception easy. Hence maximizing the firepower carried by any single bomber was vital;
* Prior to satellite intelligence, each side lacked precise knowledge of the location of the other side's military and industrial facilities;
* A bomb dropped without benefit of advanced inertial navigation systems could easily miss its intended target by six kilometres or more. Parachute retardation would only worsen the bomb's accuracy.

Thus certain bombs were designed to destroy an entire large city even if dropped five to ten kilometers from its centre. This objective meant that yield and effectiveness were positively correlated, at least up to a point. However, the advent of ICBMs accurate to 500 meters or better made such a design philosophy obsolete. Subsequent nuclear weapon design in the 1960s and 1970s focused primarily on increased accuracy, miniaturization, and safety. The standard practice for many years has been to employ multiple smaller warheads (MIRVs) to "carpet" an area. This is believed to result in greater ground damage.




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