It is common knowledge that the Tsar Cannon was never fired, and the Tsar Bell was never rung. Tested on October 30, 1961, the Tsar Bomba is listed among the Tsar items by right: it is larger than any other bomb on the planet, and it was never used by the army.
Khrushchev found it useful to demonstrate the power of the USSR at a new turn of the Cold War and in the lead-up to the brewing Cuban Missile Crisis. He threatened the imperialists with a 100-megaton bomb, but faced opposition from aircraft designers: it was too heavy for the Tupolev Tu-95. As a result, the world's largest hydrogen bomb had a blast yield of 58 megatons – enough to reduce a rock to dust and scorch any flourishing country until it is nothing but a desert.
Insiders jokingly called the bomb “Kuzka's Mother,” in reference to the Russian saying, and they were wrong: if anything, it was Kuzka's father because its code name was Ivan.
The plane, piloted by Major Andrey Durnovtsev, headed for Novaya Zemlya and dropped the bomb over a nuclear test site. It detonated at the height of 4,500 meters. The mushroom cloud was more than sixty kilometers high, witnesses could feel the impact at a distance of a thousand kilometers, and the seismic wave generated by the explosion, circled the globe three times. So Nikita Khrushchev was almost accurate when he jokingly explained that the decrease in bomb's explosive capacity was motivated by fear for the windowpanes in Moscow.
