[9] The bomb was dropped by parachute from a Tu-95V aircraft, and detonated autonomously 4,000 metres (13,000 ft) above the cape Sukhoy Nos of Severny Island, Novaya Zemlya, 15 kilometres (8 nautical miles) from Mityushikha Bay, north of the Matochkin Strait.

A secret U.S. reconnaissance aircraft named "Speed Light Alpha" monitored the blast, coming close enough to have its anti-radiation paint scorched.

[4][14] In theory, the bomb would have had a yield over 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238[16] tamper which featured in the design but was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout.

[16] Many published books, even some authored by those involved in product development of 602, contain inaccuracies that are replicated elsewhere,[17] including wrongly identifying Tsar Bomba as RDS-202 or RN202.

Its leadership was well aware that the USSR's deployed nuclear forces in 1960 could not reliably and credibly threaten targets in the continental United States, and that in the event of war, the Soviet Union would struggle to reply in kind.

[8] The name "Kuzka's Mother" was inspired by the statement of Khrushchev to then US Vice President Richard Nixon: "We have funds at our disposal that will have dire consequences for you.

The modern name of NII-1011 is the "Russian Federal Nuclear Center or the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics" (RFNC-VNIITF).

[17] After the successful test of the RDS-37, KB-11 employees (Sakharov, Zeldovich, and Dovidenko) performed a preliminary calculation and, on 2 February 1956, they handed over to N. I. Pavlov, a note with the parameters for charges of 150 Mt (628 PJ) and the possibility of increasing the power to 1 gigaton of TNT (4.2 EJ).

[35] The CPSU Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of the USSR adopted a draft Joint Resolution on 12 March 1956, on the preparation and testing of izdeliye 202, which read: Adopt a draft resolution of the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers on the preparation and testing of izdeliye 202.

Paragraphs required for inclusion in the draft resolution: (a) The Ministry of Medium Engineering (Comrade Avraami Zavenyagin) and the Ministry of Defense of the USSR (Comrade Georgy Zhukov) at the end of the preparatory work for the test of izdeliye 202 to report to the CPSU Central Committee on the situation; (b) The Ministry of Medium Engineering (Comrade Zavenyagin) to solve the issue of introducing a special stage of protection into the design of izdeliye 202 to ensure disarming of the product in the event of a failure of the parachute system, as well as their proposals reported to the CPSU Central Committee.

Comrades Boris Vannikov and Kurchatov are assigned to edit the final version of this resolution.In 1960, KB-11 began developing a thermonuclear device with a design capacity of one hundred megatons of TNT (418 petajoules).

On 10 July 1961, a discussion took place in the Central Committee of the CPSU, at which First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev supported the development and testing of this super-powerful bomb.

[36] The test of such a complete three-stage 100 Mt bomb was rejected due to the extremely high level of radioactive contamination that would be caused by the fission reaction of large quantities of uranium-238.

A. D. Sakharov suggested using nuclear passive material instead of the uranium-238 in the secondary bomb module, which reduced the bomb's energy to 50 Mt, and, in addition to reducing the amount of radioactive fission products, avoided the fireball's contact with the Earth's surface, thus eliminating radioactive contamination of the soil and the distribution of large amounts of fallout into the atmosphere.

For this, the second stage was separated into two fusion charges which were placed in the front and rear parts of the bomb, for which a synchronous detonation was required with a difference in initiation of no more than 100 nanoseconds.

The carrier, aside from having its fuel tanks and bomb bay doors removed, had its BD-206 bomb-holder replaced by a new, heavier beam-type BD7-95-242 (or BD-242) holder attached directly to the longitudinal weight-bearing beams.

The converted bomber, designated the Tu-95V, was accepted for duty and was handed over for flight tests, which including a release of a mock-up "superbomb", were conducted under the command of Colonel S. M. Kulikov until 1959, and passed without major issues.

Despite the creation of the Tu-95V bomb-carrier aircraft, the test of the Tsar Bomba was postponed for political reasons: namely, Khrushchev's visit to the United States and a pause in the Cold War.

The Tu-95V had all connectors in its automatic release mechanism replaced, the bomb bay doors removed and the aircraft itself covered with a special, reflective white paint.

[2][44] The bomb was attached to an 800-kilogram (1,800 lb), 1,600-square-metre (17,000 sq ft) parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km (28 mi) away from ground zero, giving them a 50 percent chance of survival.

The Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32 (or 11:33; USGS earthquake monitors list the event as occurring at 11:33:31 [45]) Moscow Time on 30 October 1961, over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range (Sukhoy Nos Zone C), at a height of 4,200 m (13,780 ft) ASL (4,000 m (13,123 ft) above the target)[10][32][41][Notes 1] By this time the Tu-95V had already escaped to 39 km (24 mi) away, and the Tu-16 53.5 km (33.2 mi) away.

[citation needed] All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed.

In districts hundreds of kilometres from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed; stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour.

This fact had probably been first postulated in October 1949 (three years before the Ivy Mike test which utilized the Teller-Ulam design[60]), when in the supplement to the official report of the General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission, nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Isaac Rabi stated that thermonuclear weapons can potentially have "unlimited destructive power".

[63] A 2015 expedition measuring the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya reported 65–130 times more radioactivity than the background in neighboring areas, due to nuclear testing, including Tsar Bomba.

It has been estimated that detonating the original 100 Mt (420 PJ) design would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%.

[66] It was decided that a full 100 Mt detonation would create a nuclear fallout that was unacceptable in terms of pollution from a single test, as well as a near-certainty that the release plane and crew would be destroyed before it could escape the blast radius.

[67] The Tsar Bomba was the culmination of a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapons designed by the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1950s (e.g., the Mark 17[citation needed] and B41 nuclear bombs).

[2] The Tsar Bomba was never intended to be a practical or mass-produced weapon; it was a single product, the design of which allowed reaching a power of 100 Mt.

[22] However, there were several "super-heavy" ballistic missiles that were developed by the Soviet Union whose early impetus was at least partially, if not entirely, designed to give them a capability to use warheads in the 50-150 Mt range.