The year 1945 was marked not only by the victory of the Allied countries in World War II over fascist Germany and its allies, but also by another crucial event. Two Japanese cities were destroyed with just two bombs, one for each. Humanity has entered a new era. The nuclear age has begun.
The nuclear bomb with the funny name “Kid” became the first charge created by physicists, capable of inflicting such massive destruction on the enemy and successfully used during the hostilities. The historic B-29 aircraft, which carried out this mission, stands in the Museum of American Aviation and Cosmonautics, on its polished duralumin board the name of the mother of the ship’s commander, Enola Gay, is inscribed. On August 6, the first blow was delivered, and three days later the second, in the city of Nagasaki. This nuclear bomb also had a funny name - “Fat Man”.
The first bomb was arranged quite simply, according to the "cannon" principle. The supercritical mass of uranium was placed in a piece of the artillery barrel from the ship’s gun, and in the breech there was a charge that created its compaction necessary for the emergence of a chain reaction. The nuclear bomb was three meters long, weighed four tons, and the mass of the combat uranium charge was 64 kilograms, of which only about 700 grams reacted. The rest of the weight of this terrible weapon consisted of the aforementioned fragment of the barrel, shell, stabilizers, fuses and other minor material.
The low efficiency suffered by the first nuclear bomb caused a relatively small amount of radiological contamination of the soil and a small destructive force for this class of weapons, measured in the thousands of tons of TNT necessary to cause such damage. At "Baby" she had about 15,000 tons. For comparison, the maximum payload of the B-29 “Super Fortress” was 9 tons. For four and a half years, such a bomber would have had to carry out daily sorties in order to inflict approximately such destruction on the enemy.
Humanity has always strived forward and upward, trying to surpass itself, and especially in the field of creating devices for the extermination of all living things. The TNT equivalent was increased, new, “layered”, technologies and other ingenious solutions were used to increase the efficiency of atomic weapons.
The apogee of destructive power created by physicists was the "product of AN 602". Not that it was impossible to create something even more terrible, it was possible, only there would be nowhere to experience.
The most powerful nuclear bomb in history, by tradition, also got its own name, albeit unofficially, “Kuzkina mother” or “Kuzka”. It was this creature that threatened to show the Americans N.S. Khrushchev, and in the days of the XXII Congress of the CPSU (1961) kept his promise.
At first they wanted to “bang” 100 megatons, but they regretted the Norilsk Metallurgical Plant. They agreed on half the equivalent. The length of the bomb was twelve meters, its diameter was two and a half, the hull remained the same, from the hundred-megaton, and did not fit into the usual bomb bay of the Tu-95, it was necessary to slightly trim the edges and remove the wings. The effect exceeded all expectations, a blast wave tripled around the planet.
True, it later turned out that the military did not need such a nuclear bomb, its delivery to the target was problematic, and several less powerful charges could cause the enemy more harm than one giant explosion.
It is hoped that the history of nuclear conflicts will end with the first two bombs dropped in 1945.