Sakharov also played a significant role in designing this weapon, which incorporated multiple inter-reacting stages and was 26 feet long, almost seven feet in diameter, and weighed almost 60,000 pounds. The site chosen for testing this device was Mityushikha Bay on Severny Island in the Arctic Circle. Great Britain emulated these with open air atomic weapons tests in the late 1950s (France would follow with tests in Polynesia in the 1960s and beyond.) While the Americans focused on perfecting accurate delivery systems for small to medium size atomic devices, however, the Soviets concentrated on building larger and larger devices of almost unimaginable power. Courtesy of The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) photo stream.įrom there the United States and the Soviet Union carried out a further series of open-air tests of atomic weapons. The Ivy Mike thermonuclear test, November 1, 1952.
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