Soviet engineers detonated the Tsar Bomba in 1961, a thermonuclear weapon so insanely powerful that it shattered glass windows in Norway and Finland, nearly a thousand miles away from the blast zone.

A closer look

Soviet engineers detonated the Tsar Bomba in 1961, a thermonuclear weapon so insanely powerful that it shattered glass windows in Norway and Finland, nearly a thousand miles away from the blast zone. The fifty-megaton monster was roughly three thousand, three hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, creating a blinding fireball that was visible from over six hundred miles away. The custom-built parachute attached to the bomb was so massive that it disrupted the Soviet Union's hosiery industry because they had to commandeer so much nylon just to slow the weapon down long enough for the pilot to escape. The resulting mushroom cloud punched through the stratosphere and reached a height of forty miles, proving that Cold War dick-measuring contests were not only incredibly dangerous but also visually terrifying on a planetary scale