What is the most powerful nuclear weapon to date?

Question

if "Tsar Bomba" in 1961 was 100 megatons, there must be some Gigaton bombs by now.

lol they had nothing in 1961, technologically compared to now...

Answer 1

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There was no military reason to build more powerful bombs.

It just makes them harder to deliver to the target.

Very high yield bombs like the "Tzar Bomba" were too heavy for ICBMs and severely limited the range of the (easily intercepted) aircraft that carried them.

Also the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty banned Nuclear tests over 150 Kilotons

Answer 2

It was actually the Tsar Bomba, and that was only tested to be 57 Megatons since they replaced the uranium tamper with lead since they worried the collateral damage it would have on their own country had they detonated it at maximum yield.

At that age of the nuclear arms race, huge yield bombs were made since dropping them from aircraft was still the primary option, and a larger bomb provides a greater margin of error to ensure target destruction even if the bomb was dropped far from it. But after 1961, the development and advancement of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles improved accuracy enough to make large yields unnecessary. Three lower-yield warheads on missiles can destroy a city more effectively than a single bomb with the sum of those yields.

Answer 3

The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of energy discharged when a nuclear weapon is detonated, expressed usually in the equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene (TNT), either in kilotons (thousands of tons of TNT) or megatons (millions of tons of TNT), but sometimes also in terajoules (1 kiloton of TNT = 4.184 TJ). Because the precise amount of energy released by TNT is and was subject to measurement uncertainties, especially at the dawn of the nuclear age, the accepted convention is that one kt of TNT is simply defined to be 1012 calories equivalent, this being very roughly equal to the energy yield of 1,000 tons of TNT.

Answer 4

hold all of your farts in for a month. then, go to your local marine corps recruiting office and fart in the recruiter's face so powerfully that it blows the medals right off of his chest.

Answer 5

Do you think that any govt would make that info public.