Theoretically, the most powerful nuclear bomb can indeed destroy a province, in fact, the largest yield nuclear bomb ever made in human history is more than enough to destroy a country, such as the nuclear ** codenamed "Tsar Bomba" produced in the former Soviet Union.
At the end of World War II, the United States took the lead in coming up with nuclear weapons, as a new type of nuclear weapons that can change the way modern warfare is conducted, and one nuclear weapon is enough to inflict huge tactical damage on the adversary. Therefore, after the United States had nuclear weapons, world powers, including the Soviet Union, invested huge amounts of money and energy in the field of research and development, and of course also made many technological breakthroughs.
After the 60s of the last century, the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, have successively possessed a new generation of nuclear ** with greater power, but on the whole, the two sides can still reach a basic balance.
Therefore, in order to be able to compete for hegemony, the two countries have also begun to launch an arms race in terms of nuclear power, which is simply to see who can have the most lethal and largest nuclear weapons. It was also during this period that the Soviet Union proposed the Tsar Bomba program, and they wanted to develop a new type of nuclear ** that had never been seen before in human history.
On July 10, 1961, the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered the famous nuclear scientist Sakharov to lead a scientific research team to develop the world's largest hydrogen bomb, and Khrushchev's goal for the scientific research team was to achieve a yield of 100 million tons of this nuclear **.
The purpose of developing this unprecedented nuclear weapon is to make a single nuclear weapon capable of destroying half of the United States, which can be a soldier without a fight, and make the United States afraid as long as it thinks of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapon. Objectively speaking, Khrushchev's plan is indeed very crazy, but it is also very genius, and if it can be successfully completed, it can indeed effectively strengthen the strategic deterrence capability of the Soviet Union.
After receiving the order, Sakharov's scientific research team achieved its goal with unimaginable development speed, and they developed a new hydrogen bomb, codenamed N602, in just 14 weeks. This kind of energy reached 100 million tons, which was also unprecedented in human history at that time.
However, the Soviet scientific research team at that time believed that if this kind of ** was really used, it was likely to have an extremely bad impact on the ecological environment near the test site, so it was finally decided to reduce the nuclear yield of the Tsar Bomba to half of the original plan, that is, about 50 million tons.
But even if it is only 50 million tons, the power of the Tsar Bomba is still more than 3,800 times that of the nuclear weapons used by the United States in Hiroshima, which is still a frightening figure. Subsequently, the Soviet top brass sent a Tu-95 bomber stationed at the military base on the Kola Peninsula to carry the new Tsar Bomba to test a nuclear explosion on the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Russian Arctic.
In October 1961, Tu-95 strategic bombers successfully delivered the Tsar Bomba over the test site and detonated it. According to the data released by the Soviet Union, the fireball produced by the Tsar Bomba** had a radius of an astonishing 4,600 meters, a mushroom cloud with a width of 40 kilometers and a height of 64 kilometers.
The impact of the Tsar Bomba on the surrounding countries is also very great, even Finland can feel the shock after the nuclear bomb, and it also pushed the Eurasian continent southward by 9 mm, and the atmospheric disturbance after the Tsar Bomba also flew around the earth three times. A nuclear ** like the Tsar Bomba can really easily destroy a province, and this is not the upper limit of nuclear ** for mankind.
Because theoretically, the world's major powers are equipped with and use the principle of nuclear fusion, and its yield can be infinite. This is mainly due to the fact that the design and production of the hydrogen bomb uses the concept of a graded design, and this stage in the stratum can be increased indefinitely.
Most of the existing mainstream hydrogen bombs are composed of two primary stages, that is, two-phase bombs in the T-U configuration. The "two-phase bomb" is essentially a fission bomb, which plays a trigger role in the process of nuclear weapons and provides itself with a large number of high-energy neutrons needed for nuclear fusion.
In the process of secondary change, it can be connected in series without limit, thus detonating countless sub-stages, which theoretically forms an infinite cycle of energy, which can increase the yield of the hydrogen bomb almost without an upper limit to strengthen the first force. In other words, we could even produce a hydrogen bomb that could blow up the entire planet.
However, this kind of ** is not necessary for human beings, because even if it can be produced, it is difficult to put it into actual combat. Moreover, in the daily maintenance process, there are more things to consider, if such a super-large core ** is not careful**, then the impact on human society will be too great.
Therefore, even the five permanent members of the Security Council have never considered the production of a particularly large yield of nuclear **, and the 50 million tons of Tsar Bomba that the Soviet Union engaged in back then was only a deterrent military experiment against the United States, and the Soviets did not really popularize and produce this ** on a large scale.
The largest nuclear yield that is now known and has entered formal service in the army is the single warhead that China tested on the Dongfeng-5 ICBM in Lop Nur in November 1976, with a yield of 4 million tons.
At present, the development path of the nuclear weapons of the three major powers of China, Russia, and the United States is to strengthen intercontinental ballistic missiles and strengthen the multi-warhead strike capability, because the deterrence brought by multi-warhead strikes is greater than that of single warheads.
No matter how large a nuclear warhead is designed with a nuclear yield, it can only carry out radiological range strikes on a central city and its surrounding areas at most.
However, multi-warhead ICBMs are different, multi-warhead ICBMs can carry out simultaneous strategic nuclear strikes on multiple cities, and even if the adversary has a complete homeland defense network, it is difficult to effectively intercept such a nuclear strike, so the deterrence of ICBMs equipped with multiple warheads is much stronger than that of single-warhead missiles.
Although the yield of each sub-guided warhead is not as large as before, the lethality of multiple warheads against multiple important cities at the same time is much stronger than that of a single warhead.
In fact, the development of human nuclear weapons technology has reached a bottleneck period, because our nuclear weapons are now enough to destroy human society, so it is not necessary to continue to develop more harmful nuclear weapons, and there is no such opponent who needs human research and development of more lethal weapons, so the nuclear weapons used by human beings in the future may still be produced today and will not continue to be updated.