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The nuclear scientists settled on a 50Mt thermonuclear warhead design, which is equivalent to nearly 3,300 Hiroshima-era atom bombs. In this second phase, nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov was key to the bomb’s development. In its first phase, the Tsar Bomba went by the code name “product 202”, then from 1960, it was known as “item 602”. It was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who ordered scientists to start work on the most powerful bomb in the world with development beginning in 1956. To level the playing field, the Soviets thought of the mother of all bluffs: a weapon so powerful it could level huge cities like New York or Paris in a single blow. So if your threat of retaliation isn’t really a genuine threat, you may face total annihilation. Nuclear deterrence represents the credible threat of retaliation to forestall an enemy attack. Once nukes came into the picture, the US and the Soviet Union, the only nuclear powers at the beginning of the Cold War, each adopted nuclear deterrence as their strategy. The post-WWII military doctrine was dramatically disrupted by the introduction of nuclear weapons. Although by that time, the USSR had also developed its own thermonuclear weapons to match the USA arsenal, the Soviets had no effective means of delivering its nukes to US targets.
#Thermo nuclear time mass full
The Cold War was in full swing and the Americans were clearly winning. In the late 1950s, the Soviets found themselves in a pickle. The bomb of all bombs Ground-level view of detonation of Tsar Bomba.
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