Nuclear security

Peacemaker: How the Soviet Tsar Bomba Helped Prevent Nuclear War

Fifty-five years ago the Soviet Union detonated a 50-megaton bomb over an uninhabited island north of the Arctic Circle. The most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever built by man, aptly called the Tsar Bomba gave the USSR nuclear parity with the US.

The super bomb was a necessity The “thaw” in Soviet-US relations resulted, among other things, from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in the fall of 1959 ended on May 1, 1960, when a US U-2 spy plane flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down in Soviet airspace while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance of the Baikonur cosmodrome and a number of Soviet military and nuclear facilities. Powers parachuted safely, was captured and admitted the military nature of his mission. As a result, Khrushchev cancelled the scheduled opening of an east-west summit in Paris.