Witness ladies and gentlemen, the most destructive man-made force ever released upon the planet. The TSAR BOMBA - a 50 megaton nuclear device detonated in northern Russia.
From Wiki:
The Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32 a.m. on October 30th, 1961, located approximately at 73.85° N 54.50° E [3], over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range (Sukhoy Nos Zone C), north of the Arctic Circle on Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea. The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 10,500 m; it was designed to detonate at a height of 4,000 m over the land surface (4,200 m over sea level) by barometric sensors.
The original U.S. estimate of the yield was 57 Mt, but since 1991 all Russian sources have stated its yield as 50 Mt. Nonetheless, Khrushchev warned in a filmed speech to the Communist parliament of the existence of a 100 Mt bomb (technically the design was capable of this yield). The fireball touched the ground, reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane, and was seen and felt 1,000 km away. The heat from the explosion could have caused third degree burns 100 km away from ground zero. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 60 km high (nearly seven times higher than Mount Everest) and 3040 km wide. The explosion could be seen and felt in Finland, even breaking windows there [4]. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage up to 1,000 km away. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth. Its Richter magnitude was about 5 to 5.25[4]
Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was a power of about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts. This is equivalent to approximately 1% of the power output of the Sun. The detonation of Tsar Bomba therefore qualifies as being the single most powerful device ever utilized throughout the history of humanity. By contrast, the largest weapon ever produced by the United States, the now-decommissioned B41, had a predicted maximum yield of 25 Mt, and the largest nuclear device ever tested by the U.S. (Castle Bravo) yielded 15 Mt (an accident due to a runaway reaction; the design yield was approximately 5 Mt).[5] Note the recent comparison with the asteroid impact which formed the Chicxulub Crater, an event larger than Tsar Bomba's yield by some six orders of magnitude, released an estimated 500 zettajoules (5.0×1023 joules) of energy, approximately 100 teratons of TNT, on impact.
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