12

Background

The Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created. On 30 October 1961 the Soviet Union experimentally detonated the bomb after dropping it from a plane above Nova Zembla. A second plane was nearby to gather data on the explosion.

Claim

According to this article from the bbc:

In order to give the two planes a chance to survive – and this was calculated as no more than a 50% chance – Tsar Bomba was deployed by a giant parachute weighing nearly a tonne.

A similar thing is mentioned on the English article on the Tsar Bomba from wikipedia:

Both aircraft were painted with the special reflective paint to minimize heat damage. Despite this effort, Durnovtsev and his crew were given only a 50% chance of surviving the test.

My Skepticism

This 50% chance seems a bit suspicious to me, because it is a conveniently round number, it is quite a low survival rate for an experiment (even for a high profile military experiment during the cold war), and it is not clear to me why it should be so dangerous.

Wikipedia lists the CTBTO website as the source for this claim. While the CTBTO is a respectable organisation, the webpage is not a primary source and does not fully convince me.

There is no mention of the 50% chance on the Russian version of the wikipedia page (using google translate).

This document claims that:

even if the parachute system had failed during the test, the bomber's crew would not have been endangered, as the bomb contained a special mechanism which triggered its detonation only after the plane had reached a safe distance

Which directly contradicts the 50% claim.

Question

Does a primary source exist for the 50% number? Or is there any evidence suggesting that the Soviets either did or did not think beforehand that there was a significant chance of the crew not surviving the experiment?

William H. Fields
  • 166
  • 3
  • 7
    I will note that the Tsar Bomba is reported to have had a yield on the order of 50 megatons, while the Hiroshima bomb was only around 15 kilotons. Which is to say that the Tsar Bomba was around 3000 times more powerful. – Daniel R Hicks May 22 '20 at 20:56
  • 3
    Re *as the bomb contained a special mechanism which triggered its detonation only after the plane had reached a safe distance* -- I have a harder time accepting that claim compared to the USSR sending planes where the only protection was flying away before the bomb goes off. The former would require a high degree of sophistication, one that Russia does not use to this day on its rocket launches. Russian rockets do not have a flight termination system. If the launch fails and the rocket lands on some remote village, so be it. – David Hammen May 23 '20 at 17:27
  • 1
    Can't this be answered by some speed/ distance calculations? How long does it take for the bomb to fall to the ground, how far do the planes fly in this time, how big is the lethal range of the bomb? First 2 should be easy and hopefully give a number so that a rough estimate for the 3 will suffice. – quarague May 24 '20 at 14:03
  • 1
    "Conveniently" round numbers also happen when you have very imprecise numbers. – Loren Pechtel May 25 '20 at 00:26
  • @quarague The hard one is the 3rd. "Lethal range" isn't a precise number. The Wikipedia article says the bomber dropped 1km from the shockwave and elsewhere I have read that the plane suffered some damage from the flash. Just how much does it take the to blow the bomber out of the sky? I doubt they knew. – Loren Pechtel May 25 '20 at 00:32
  • I don't have 'primary' sources and it's generally hard to prove negative, but this is highly implausible. USSR had enough experience by then to judge the effects for a given yield, and in fact the shockwave effect on the airplanes was fairly minor. Such high risks for 'operational' scenario were not normal even in the USSR. The chances of a failure were unlikely that high either: this was an extremely important experiement. And even though it was considered imprudent by some even then, the bomber was fully crewed during the drop, including the rear gunner. This is inconsistent with 50% risk... – Zeus May 25 '20 at 06:18
  • One also has to consider the possibility that the bomb was not air dropped, but positioned on the ground, with the air drop being disinformation. Why would they fake that? To get the the western world to think that they could deliver the weapon. The first H bombs developed by the US were all prepositioned on the ground, with the later air drops testing if a H bomb could be delivered. It strikes me as unrealistic that the first test of such a weapon would be an air drop. – tj1000 May 26 '20 at 09:22
  • 4
    @DavidHammen Nonsense. This "high degree of sphistication" trigger could be as simple as a switch activated from radio by the plane's pilot once he knows he's far away enough. This was a prototype after all, they didn't need any hard-tested all-weather all-time failsafe device. – Rekesoft May 28 '20 at 09:38
  • @DavidHammen "So be it" or "Soviet"? ;) –  Jun 02 '20 at 21:50
  • @MicahWindsor - Good one. The pun was not intentional. – David Hammen Jun 02 '20 at 22:19
  • @Rekesoft - Why would the Soviet Union do that? This was a country that had a rather cavalier attitude (by Western standards) toward human life, and a country that well before the Soviet Union existed that had a strong view of the patriotic value of service toward to the country. A quarter of a century later, the Soviet Union asked hundreds of thousands to perform far riskier actions in cleaning up the Chernobyl disaster. Those Chernobyl liquidators faced known long-term health issues, and yet they responded. Some of those liquidators were forced to do so, but others willingly volunteered. – David Hammen Jun 02 '20 at 22:43
  • @Rekesoft - Adding a radio relay trigger would have added a device that could have failed. Once again, why would the Soviet Union have done that? I have a much harder time thinking the Soviet Union would have added such a device than simply not using it. And I would have an even harder time thinking that the Soviet Union would have named the pilot of the plane a Hero of the Soviet Union if such a device had been in place. – David Hammen Jun 02 '20 at 22:45
  • 1
    @DavidHammen The key here seems to be the phrase _"*I* would have a hard time thinking"_. Yes, *you* apparently believe that the USSR was the Klingon empire, a mostly fictional country whose only purpose was to deliver an infinite amount of enemies of the USA, mindless drones disposed to sacrifice everything to achieve their nefarious goals. It was not. Communist dictatorship and all, despite all the horrors and failures it caused upon its citizens, it was not the comic book villian you think. And, by the way, cancer deaths among Manhattan Project miners outnumber Chernobyl cases 25:1. – Rekesoft Jun 03 '20 at 06:28
  • Certainly sounds like propaganda. Many times we have heard "the Soviets don't care about the lives of their citizens" stories from Western sources. – dont_shog_me_bro Nov 20 '22 at 00:28

0 Answers0