Amazing facts about nuclear weapons

The early stages of nuclear weapons development were marked by an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Although the United States built the first atomic bombs and dropped them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the Soviet nuclear program was not inferior when it tested. nuclear bomb in 1949. By the early 1950s, the two countries had developed even more powerful weapons: the hydrogen bomb.

The nuclear weapons test conducted by the US at Bikini Atoll on July 24, 1946, produced an explosion with a destructive force equivalent to 21,000 tons of TNT.

In this competition, the parties worked to build more and larger nuclear bombs until their stockpiles of nuclear weapons peaked in the late 1960s. At that time, the United States had a total of 31,255 nuclear bombs and the Soviet Union had 40,159 bombs. One of the most powerful nuclear bombs of the Soviet Union was the Tsar Bomba, which was tested in 1961 in Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. To this day, this is still the most powerful nuclear bomb that man has ever tested in human history.

Today, although the size of the nuclear arsenal has been reduced, there is still concern about the risk of a nuclear war, with the emergence of many new factors. Experts say North Korea may be holding between 20 and 60 bombs. Iran, while insisting on pursuing a nuclear program for peaceful purposes, is still doubted by the West about its ability to develop nuclear weapons.

Here are facts about nuclear weapons that Stacker has compiled through government documents, reports and academic studies.

Countries armed with nuclear weapons

According to security experts, there are 9 countries possessing nuclear weapons in the world including: USA, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Of these, Israel neither confirms nor denies the existence of nuclear weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union were the first two countries to develop this weapon, followed by Britain, France, and China.

Currently, the US and Russia account for nearly 90% of the world's 13,500 nuclear warheads. According to the Arms Control Association, the US has about 5,800 nuclear warheads, while Russia has 6,375. Both countries have deployed about 1,350 nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles or bombers.

China has a relatively modest nuclear arsenal of about 250 warheads and nuclear bombs. The country conducted its first nuclear test in 1964.

Efforts to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1968 and entered into force on March 5, 1970. Since then, 191 countries have participated, including the US, Russia, China, the UK, and France. These countries are allowed to keep their nuclear weapons, but there is a tendency to reduce their numbers. India, Pakistan and Israel are not parties to the treaty, North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003 and it has tested nuclear weapons six times since 2006.

Number of bombs and nuclear devices lost or misplaced

According to the Brookings Institution, the US lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents. On February 5, 1958, the US Air Force lost a 3,500kg hydrogen bomb in Wassaw Sound, Georgia, and the bomb has not been found to this day.

In 1965, a US Navy A-4 Skyhawk bomber carrying pre-loaded B43 nuclear weapons was moving aboard the USS Ticonderoga to prepare for a drill when an incident occurred. It deviated from the ladder and quickly sank 5km below the sea surface. It is not clear whether the bomb exploded or sank deep in the sea. By 1968, a B-52 plane carrying four nuclear bombs crashed in Greenland. At least three were broken. With most of the debris collected, investigators found they did not find any fragments of the fourth bomb. In addition, there were many other incidents where US nuclear equipment was exploded or lost. .

A 1989 study found that 50 warheads and nine nuclear reactors were lost on the ocean floor as a result of accidents involving American and Soviet combat vehicles at the time.

A nuclear bomb the size of a truck

 Bomb B53.

The B53 bomb was put into use in 1962 when the tension in the Cold War was at its peak. This bomb weighs more than 3.7 tons and is about the size of a small truck, can destroy facilities deep underground. In 1997, it was removed from the stockpile of active nuclear weapons and then disassembled in 2011.

The largest nuclear weapon in the US stockpile

Despite its massive size, the B53 is not America's largest nuclear weapon. The largest weapon in the US stockpile is the B83, which has an explosive yield of 1.2 megatons. Its destructive power is 80 times greater than the atomic bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At 35% energy, everyone within a 420km radius will suffer 3rd degree burns from the thermal radiation generated by the explosion. With 50% energy, B83 was able to "blow" all buildings within a radius of 16.8km.

Plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon

The US Air Force once hatched a top secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon as a show of military might at the height of the Cold War. Astronomer Carl Sagan came up with a mathematical model for this explosion. At the time, scientists believed there could be microbial life on the Moon, and Sagan proposed triggering a nuclear explosion to detect these organisms.

Program "Nuclear detonation for the national economy" of the USSR

 Lake Chagan has a radiation level 100 times higher than the permissible level.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union began to explore the possibility of using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, such as creating canals, reservoirs or drilling for oil. One of the most famous was the nuclear test at Chagan, next to the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, in January 1965.

This test aimed to test the possibility of using nuclear to create reservoirs. This is the first and largest nuclear test in the plan to use nuclear for the National Economy program. They placed a 140-kiloton nuclear device in a 178-meter-deep hole in the bed of the Chagan River. When the device exploded, a crater 400 meters wide and 100 meters deep formed. After that, people dug canals to bring water into the lake. The test caused the water in Lake Chagan to be radioactive and to have a radioactive level 100 times higher than the legal limit.

Strange object appeared from the world's first nuclear bomb test

The US conducted its first atomic bomb test at Trinity, in the US state of New Mexico in 1945. The heat of the explosion caused the sand in the surrounding area to turn into a glass-like material, known as 'Trinitite'. , named after the site of the explosion. Inside trinitite, scientists discovered a rare form of matter known as a 'quasicrystal'.