About a year ago, I read Richard Rhodes’ Dark Sun, a very detailed and well-written book about the development of the hydrogen bomb. His The Making of the Atomic Bomb is excellent as well.
One paragraph especially stuck with me just for its mind-boggling magnitude:
During the war, Serber remembers, “On Edward Teller’s blackboard at Los Alamos, I once saw a list of weapons—ideas for weapons—with their abilities and properties displayed. For the last one on the list, the largest, the method of delivery was listed as ‘backyard.’ Since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it elsewhere.”
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And here I was thinking you were talking about Dungeons and Dragons abandonware
True fact: The Soviets’ Tsar Bomba (tested in 1962) created the largest manmade explosion ever: 50 Mt or 56 Mt, depending on who you believe — not that the extra 6 Mt would mean much to anything within, say, 100 km. The Soviets had originally designed the bomb for a yield of 100 Mt, but decided that this couldn’t be tested without spreading unacceptable levels of fallout throughout the Northern Hemisphere — and so they scaled it *down* to 50 Mt. According to some sources, the USSR also had an alternate design for the 100 MT version, salted with cobalt-60 and sodium-23 specifically to produce a globally effective enhanced-fallout weapon (this was the inspiration for the “doomsday bomb” in “Dr. Strangelove”).