Tsar Bomba - King of the Bombs - 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT

October 30th, 1961 the Russians detonated the Tsar bomba (King of bombs). Initially a 100 Mt design, they opted to not detonate something equivalent to 100,000,000 tonnes of TNT. A 50 Mt design was detonated in its stead to reduced the nuclear fall out, at the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Air deliverable, the Tsar bomba would demonstrate to the United States and its allies that nuclear brinksmanship had entered a new realm and would lead to catastrophe. The bomb, approved by Khrushchev, was commissioned around the time when France emerged as the second Western European nuclear state and almost a year after France demonstrated its first successful nuclear test.

A three-stage hydrogen bomb, this bomb was ten times the combined total explosives detonated in the second world war, which included the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. A three-stage design is where the energy from a first stage fission bomb is used to compress the second-stage thermonuclear reaction from which the resulting energy is used to compress a much larger multiple third stage explosion.

Ironically, this was one of the "cleanest" nuclear bombs ever created. A lead tamper, instead of uranium-238, was used to eliminate fast fission. The release planes flew out 45 kilometres from ground zero to observe the resulting explosion which generated a fireball 8 kilometres in diameter. The explosion was seen felt almost 1,000 kilometres away, with a resulting mushroom clouds reaching 64 kilometres high (seven times higher than mount everest). It broke windows in Finland and Sweden because of atmospheric focusing and the shockwave could still be felt on its third pass around the earth.

The entire fission-fusion process lasted 39 nanoseconds and therefore yielded an equivalent energy output equivalent to 1.4% of the total power output of the sun.