tsar bomba (12. 837)

As our faithful chronicler reminds, on this day in 1961—as news comes that Trump has directed his Department of War to resume nuclear testing partially in response to a successful trial by Russia of a submarine drone after a thirty-three year hiatus and will yield no benefit for America’s arsenal and only inflict more lasting environmental damage—the Soviet Union detonated the largest ever thermonuclear aerial weapon, codenamed Project Vanya, over Novaya Zemla, an arctic archipelago in the extreme northeast. Ordered by Secretary Khrushchev when the country quit the test ban moratorium (see previously) and timed to coincide with the gathering of the twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party. Four thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and over three times the yield of the then largest US trial, Castle Bravo, carrying out the test garnered strong international condemnation and resulted in a partial nuclear test ban treaty at the instigation of Moscow and the chief scientist behind the programme. Confirming the theory that multistage charges could be calibrated with unlimited destructive power, neither side attempted to increase the scale for fear of creating a doomsday weapon. Though window panes were broken as far away as Finland and Norway from the seismic shock and anything within a hundred kilometres of ground-zero was annihilated, fallout was minimal and quickly dispersed with no consequences that would deter reoccupation.