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Why should anyone care? If making larger and larger hydrogen bombs was militarily useful, people would have continued to do it. But there is actually no purpose
by perl4ever 6y ago
Why should anyone care? If making larger and larger hydrogen bombs was militarily useful, people would have continued to do it. But there is actually no purpose to making the largest explosion possible, let alone literally blowing up the world which someone once claimed was theoretically possible.
Why would a bomb that is larger than needed to destroy the largest city be useful?
Besides the Tsar Bomba, there is also a Tsar Bell, the largest bell, equally as pointless:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bell
Oh, and a Tsar Cannon, "largest bombard by caliber in the world":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon
- rsynnott 6y agoOne motivator for these giant bombs was the poor accuracy of the early ICBMs. The Soviet Union at one time planned to get around this with really enormous warheads and ICBMs; the Proton rocket used to launch Mir and ISS components started life as a design for a super-ICBM (though it was never deployed as such). By the time this test happened accuracy had improved enough that it was kind of pointless, and the whole thing is a bit of a historical oddity. Both the US and Soviet Union did explore using really big fusion bombs for geo engineering (there was a bonkers plan to dig a harbour in Alaska with them, notably), but early testing of these concepts were not promising and the atmospheric test ban killed it off.
- m4rtink 6y agoFranakly with Proton it was almost certainly a play by the design bureau to get their project funded - and everybody else did that back then.