The most destructive weapons that humans have ever made, bombs are capable of incinerating
countless lives in an instant, or causing slow, painful deaths by radiation poisoning,
even hundreds of miles away.
These are the most powerful bombs ever used.
Toward the very end of WWII, the British developed what they called the "Grand Slam" earthquake
bomb, a staggeringly heavy device with terrible destructive force.
Weighing in at an incredible 21,500 pounds, this bomb was first used against Nazi Germany
on March 14th, 1945.
The Grand Slam evolved from its powerful predecessor, the "Tallboy," and sprung from the mind of
engineer Barnes Wallis — the man responsible for the bouncing bombs deployed by the famous
dam-busters.
The bombs were so heavy that only specially modified Lancaster bombers were capable of
even carrying them.
The force unleashed by the Grand Slam was capable of causing an earthquake, meaning
that just one bomb could obliterate enemy infrastructure over a large area whether or
not the pilot achieved a direct hit.
More than 40 Grand Slams were used to devastate German defenses in the war's closing days.
The Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB — jokingly called the "mother of all bombs" — is the
biggest non-nuclear weapon ever used by the U.S. in a combat situation.
The 30-foot-long device was deployed in the mountains of Afghanistan via cargo plane in
an attempt to wipe out a group of fighters aligned with the Islamic State.
First developed in 2003, the U.S. military initially wanted to use the MOAB as a psychological
weapon to scare enemy fighters.
It was never actually used until 2017, when it was dropped on a dangerous region of Afghanistan
close to the Pakistan border.
The area was riddled with hard-to-reach underground tunnels and rigged with explosives, making
the area too dangerous to traverse by ground troops.
That provided the perfect opportunity for America to test out its mega-bomb in the field
during the early days of the Trump administration.
"Another— really, another successful job.
We're very, very proud of our military."
With an enormous blast radius of roughly one mile in diameter, the MOAB is capable of flattening
many buildings at once.
It's only suitable for use in specific circumstances, far away from civilian centers.
In 2019, China began testing its own version of the so-called "mother of all bombs" in
an attempt to compete with similar devices developed by Russia and the United States.
China's MOAB is just one of a number of explosive weapons that the country has developed in
recent years as part of their upscaling of its military arsenal.
China's defense industry giant went so far as to release a promotional video of the enormous
explosion their MOAB produced, just to show it off.
According to the Economic Times of India, it has been rumored that the Chinese bomb
is thermobaric in nature.
Thermobaric bombs can have grisly effects on civilian bystanders, which include ruptured
organs and eardrums, blindness, and the possibility of inhaling burning fuel, all while the victim
is conscious.
Many people believe their use should be considered a war crime.
However, the Chinese company NORINCO, which developed the bomb, has denied the accusation.
At present, it is believed that China's MOABs represent the most powerful non-nuclear weapon
the country has ever developed.
Not one to be outdone for firepower, Russia tested its very own super-weapon to rival
America in 2007.
The FOAB, or "father of all bombs," is Russia's answer to America's MOAB — and it's four
times more powerful.
Today, it is quite possibly the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in existence.
Unfortunately for its potential targets, Russia's FOAB is not just a very big bomb — it is
also the largest thermobaric weapon known to humankind.
These terrifying explosives are capable of creating a massive inferno by releasing a
huge cloud of fuel.
What's worse, even those not directly caught in the fiery blast can be horribly injured
or killed by the massive vacuum left in the bomb's wake.
Given its scale, the deputy head of the Russian armed forces compared the impact of the FOAB
to a nuclear explosion — although some critics consider this to be an exaggeration.
The terrifying nuclear weapon with a cutesy name, "Little Boy" was the first of two bombs
dropped on Japan in 1945.
The weapon that leveled Hiroshima was uranium based, and the explosion it unleashed was
roughly the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.
The blast from "Little Boy" was so massive that Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola
Gay aircraft that dropped the bomb, felt the shockwave hit the plane as he flew away.
"And actually, when the shockwave hit me, I said 'There is success.'"
Tibbets further recalled —
"We saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us with this tremendous mushroom on
top.
Beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima."
This marked the first time a nuclear weapon had ever been used on people.
Its effects were devastating; 140,000 people living in Hiroshima were killed by the blast,
and the flattened city resembled a pile of burned-out matchsticks.
Many residents were vaporized instantly, while others died from radiation sickness and cancer.
Fat Man was the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9th,
1945.
The U.S. had already destroyed Hiroshima three days prior, but America was determined to
carry out a second display of strength.
This plutonium powered device had a much more complicated mechanism than its uranium powered
brother, with a more powerful explosive force equal to around 20,000 tons of TNT.
The pit crew scribbled "Here's to you!" and "A second kiss for Hirohito" on the metal
casing and signed their names before they sent it off to cause massive destruction.
Originally, the bomber was supposed to drop the device on the city of Kokura, but poor
weather conditions caused a last-minute change of target.
The U.S. opted to drop Fat Man right away before conditions changed again, so they chose
Nagasaki.
Although the second bomb was bigger, a timely evacuation order meant that fewer people died
at Nagasaki than at Hiroshima — but the death toll was still staggering.
Around 74,000 people were killed by the effects of the blast by the end of 1945.
With the blessing of President Harry Truman, U.S. scientists began to build the first of
several "superbombs" that would outstrip those used in the war many times over.
Researchers began working with hydrogen to create new, more sophisticated devices — and
by 1952 scientists had created "the Mike shot," a hydrogen bomb with an explosion that proved
to be 1,000 times bigger than the device used at Hiroshima.
"We have minutes to go before the first blast Mike shot of Operation Ivy."
For safety's sake, the 20-foot-long device had to be triggered from a ship stationed
30 miles away.
During a period of testing code-named Operation Ivy, Mike was detonated on an atoll in the
South Pacific.
The test was so successful that the Island of Elugelab which the bomb was tested on was
completely destroyed in the blast.
The ensuing mushroom cloud reached 135,000 feet and 100 miles wide.
All that remains of the island today is a ring-shaped hole.
As the Cold War got hotter, the bombs got bigger — and between 1946 and 1958, the
U.S. went through a period of intense nuclear testing.
During this period, 67 hydrogen bomb tests were carried out in the South Pacific Marshall
Islands.
Scientific American reports that the area now has an extremely high rate of cancers
— and strontium levels in the islands remain freakishly high.
One of these detonations was the so-called Castle Romeo hydrogen bomb test, one of the
biggest and most successful nuclear experiments in history.
The explosion was apparently so enormous that it produced a 44,000-foot-high mushroom cloud
in less than a minute.
The deadly ash cloud that formed on top reached an incredible sixty miles across and climbed
to a staggering 110,000 feet high.
The Castle Yankee shot was similarly enormous — it produced a 13.5 megaton yield that
seriously damaged a plane flying nearby to gather information.
The Castle Bravo nuclear test remains the largest detonation by the U.S. to date.
When it was built, the device was nicknamed "The Shrimp" — and the test team that blew
it up was not expecting it to be a record-breaker.
The Shrimp was a lithium deuteride powered "dry" bomb, and was relatively tiny compared
to "wet" nuclear devices that had been filled with liquid hydrogen isotopes.
The design of the new bomb proved to be shockingly effective, exploding with a force equivalent
to 15 megatons of TNT — about three times larger than expected.
"The top of the fireball at this time, 40 seconds after detonation, was five miles above
sea level."
Throughout the Cold War, the USSR tested a series of nuclear bombs on the small archipelago
of Novaya Zemlya in the arctic circle.
According to a 2005 paper published in Science and Global Security, the 536 indigenous people
living in the archipelago had to be permanently removed from the area before it was transformed
into a strange nuclear wasteland.
Bombs were tested in the water, above ground, and underground in the region.
A U.N. body dedicated to the study of atomic radiation reported that Soviet test bombs
174 and 219 were particularly enormous, outdoing Castle Bravo by an alarming margin.
These bombs each produced a yield of 24.2 megatons, dwarfing the American record of
just 15 megatons.
The RDS-220 or "Tsar Bomba" — the USSR's "king of bombs" — was the most destructive
weapon ever detonated, and by a comfortable margin.
This weapon's blast was at least twice as powerful as anything that came before it,
yielding a 50-megaton explosive force that shattered windows in Finland and Norway.
Tested over the Arctic in 1961, the Tsar Bomba had a complex three-stage detonation mechanism
designed to cause maximum damage.
When the device was fired, the energy created by the initial atomic blast was compressed
to create a second, super-massive thermonuclear explosion.
The mushroom cloud that the bomb created swelled to an extraordinary height — up to the stratosphere
— and the heat from the blast could be felt 170 miles away.
The crew who released the bomb were told that their mission only had a 50 percent chance
of survival.
Due to the height at which the bomb was detonated, the fallout from the explosion was blasted
back into the atmosphere by a shockwave reflected by the ground, averting a potential catastrophe.
Additionally, the scientists working on the bomb were aware of the danger of radioactive
fallout, so they reduced the amount of fissionable materials.
Unfortunately, the replacement was lead, but at least it meant less immediate fallout.
Nonetheless, the project caused an international outcry.
Even the Soviets themselves seem to have realized that they had gone too far this time, as the
Tsar Bomba test was one of the factors that led to the signing of the Partial Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty in 1963.