On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb, which had a destructive power of 50 megatons of TNT.
The ever-increasing number of components on a microchip is a prime example of burgeoning innovation. Intel The first microprocessor, 4004, released in 1971, had 2,300 transistors; half a century later, the Apple M1 Max topped out at more than 50 billion—an increase of seven orders of magnitude. Most other technological advances have lagged behind: throughout the 20th century, top travel speeds increased less than 10 times, from 100 kilometers per hour on express trains to 900 kilometers per hour on cruising jetliners. From the Singer Tower (187 meters) to the Twin Towers , skyscrapers are only 2.4 times taller (452 meters).
But unfortunately, there is one achievement that has been achieved even greater since 1945: the destructive power of dynamite.
Modern explosives date back to the 19th century, with trinitrotoluene (TNT) and dynamite in the 1860s, followed by the patented RDX (Royal Demolition Dynamite) in 1898. During World War II, the power of explosions was in the form of massive bombings, and by the end of the war, in 1945, the most powerful explosive weapon was the Nazi V-2 rocket. It carries 910 kilograms of amator - a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate - and has an explosive energy of about 3.5 gigajoules.
More than 16 years of explosive growth matched the achievements of Moore's Law in the 50 years since 1970
Then came a whole new class of explosives, those that exploit nuclear fission and fusion. The atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima on August 7, 1945 released 63 GJ of energy, half of which was shock waves and about one third was thermal radiation. The Nagasaki atomic bomb dropped two days later released approximately 105 GJ. But the first two bombs pale in comparison to those that followed. The most powerful U.S. hydrogen (or fusion) bomb tested in 1954 was equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT (63 petajoules). This far surpassed October 30, 1961, when the Soviet Union tested the RDS-220 bomb over Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean. Fifty-nine years later, in August 2020, Rosatom (Russia’s atomic energy agency) released a 40-minute-long film claiming that the bomb, nicknamed Tsar Bomba – the Emperor’s bomb – had a yield of 50 megatons.
In this remarkable video, the antiquated analogue instruments stand in strange contrast to the weapon's immense destructive power. The bomb was suspended under the belly of a Tu-95 bomber, dropped by parachute from an altitude of 10.5 kilometers, and detonated 4 kilometers above the ground. The explosion released 210 PJ of energy, three orders of magnitude more than the Nagasaki bomb, and created a mushroom cloud 60-65 kilometers in diameter, with a flash visible nearly 1,000 kilometers away. Soon after, Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev claimed that his country had built but not tested a bomb twice as powerful.
The last V-2 attack on London occurred on March 27, 1945, less than six weeks before the Nazis surrendered. By the Novaya Zemlya tests in 1961, the weapon's maximum explosive energy had increased by seven orders of magnitude to over 200 PJ. This increase, over 16 years, matches what Moore's Law achieved in the 50 years since 1970. It serves as a reminder of the dire priorities of modern civilization.
