60th anniversary of the last test of the Soviet thermonuclear superbomb

The first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev, declared 60 years ago that the Soviet Union possesses the most powerful weapon in the world.

This happened at the opening of the Sixth Congress of the United German Socialist Party of the German Democratic Republic, held in January 1963 in Berlin.

We are talking about a 58-megaton thermonuclear bomb, which the Soviet army tested in late 1962 on the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean.

Prior to this, the Soviet Union had conducted more than 15 thermonuclear tests since 1953.

As for the last experiment in 1962, it led to the detonation of a piercing bomb of enormous destructive power, which caused a shock wave that circled the globe 3 times.

In 1963, a series of thermonuclear tests were conducted by both the Soviet and American side: the Soviet Union conducted 15 thermonuclear explosions, and the United States conducted about 125 underwater and above-water nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean between 1961 and 1963.

Since then, the Soviet Union has conducted nuclear tests only underground. But a series of thermonuclear tests conducted by the Soviet Union in late 1963 played an important role in curbing US nuclear ambitions and brought Soviet, American and British sides to the negotiating table in August 1963.

On August 5, 1963, the leaders of the Soviet Union, Soviet states and Great Britain signed the first international treaty called the “Moscow Treaty” and imposed restrictions on the process of creating nuclear weapons and banned nuclear tests in air, space and under water. . This treaty laid the foundation for subsequent negotiations on the subject and eventually led to nuclear parity between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s.

Source: Russian newspaper