Thunder Bolt
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When you think about nuclear weapons, the first things that probably come to mind are the devastating attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Those bombings changed the world forever, but here’s a rather sobering thought - since the first test in 1945, some 2,475 nuclear bombs have been detonated around the world, and they’ve gotten significantly more powerful.
It’s probably no surprise that of those 2,475 nuclear detonations, over 85 percent of them were performed by just two countries - the United States (1,132 bombs) and the former Soviet Union (981).
Of course, since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, nuclear weapons have never been used in a war, but if that were to happen, well it’s pretty much goodbye, Earth.
As the RealLifeLore video above explains, on 6 August 1945, the Hiroshima bomb produced an explosion of 15 kilotons (or 15,000 tons worth of TNT) and three days later, Nagasaki sustained an explosion of 21 kilotons.
But there’s a bomb in the US arsenal right now, called the B83, which can produce a blast of 1.2 megatons.
To put that into perspective, 1 megaton equals 1 million tons of TNT, which means the B83 could produce a blast 80 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
If that’s not already giving you some serious anxiety, what about the height of the mushroom cloud?
Well, as you can see in the video above, if you compared the height of the mushroom cloud that would be produced by B83 to the average altitude of a commercial airliner or Mount freaking Everest, there is no comparison.
And B83 isn’t even the largest nuclear bomb ever tested by the United States.
That title goes to Castle Bravo, which produced a blast of 15 megatons, or 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
"But even that pales in comparison to the largest nuclear weapon ever detonate," says RealLifeLore.
In October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest explosion in history when it released the Tsar Bomba - a bomb with an explosion of 50 megatons, or 3,333 Hiroshima bombs - over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
The blast was so intense, windows were shattered in Norway and Finland, and the shockwaves travelled around the entire globe three times.
And that’s not even the half of it - literally. The Soviet Union said at the time that it had plans to create a bomb that was twice as powerful as the Tsar Bomba.
I’ll let the video explain the sheer scale of that one to you, but get ready for some serious anxiety to kick in, because when you see the relative detonation sizes of each of these bombs on a map of New York, you’ll probably be ready to pack your bags and move to Proxima b.
That 4.25 light-years between us sounds just about right.
