Reuters
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2026
1:06 · 38M views · Aug 28, 2020
A short Reuters news clip showing declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It shows the blast and the mushroom cloud.
Cited as visual evidence when commenters compare energy scales, such as nuclear yields versus volcanoes or charged bodies.
3 comments from Hacker News
> "People who think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a restless volcano up close. They are a whole lot bigger than they seem to be in the films. Mount St Helens is a relatively small volcano, yet it still took me nearly 6 hours to walk out of the center crater." Maybe volcanologists who don't think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a peeved hydrogen bomb up close. [LINK] USGS estimated the blast from Mt. St. Helens was 7 megatons and 17 megatons of other thermal energy released (I guess most of that is magma flowing out). The early large fusion bombs are comparable to that, actually bigger. The largest one ever tested was 50 megatons and had a design capable of 100 megatons this video .
Especially apocalyptic given that they had never knew such things possible. Later it became routine. this video (narrator saying - "the mushroom cloud reached 65km altitude" ) Our high school military preparedness classes teacher was a retired "Captain of 2nd rank" (subcolonel equivalent in USSR Navy) who had served at that "Novaja Zemlja" islands nuclear testing range. He was describing that regular nukes they would just watch from 20km. While large hydrogen bombs they were watching from like 200km, and it still was awe-fear-inspiring. "Nuclear Tourism: When Atomic Tests Were a Tourist Attraction in Las Vegas, 1950s" [LINK] (cool sight [LINK] :)
If you could somehow do that without the 140 gigacoulombs of charge exploding violently before you got close, approximately this: this video If you don’t invoke space magic to prevent the positrons from exploding even before they annihilate anything, and they are confined into a 0.1m radius ball, the charge density energy overwhelms the annihilation energy and the ball of positrons explode with a yield of ~1e33 J, which — without exaggeration — looks more like this: [LINK]