With a bomb so destructive you might be wondering how anybody could have witnessed the blast and survived. Some people did, however, including the crew of the Tupolev TU-95 that dropped the bomb. The nine people on board the plane, plus five others on a smaller escort plane, were only given a 50% chance of survival. And yet, they watched Tsar Bomba’s mushroom cloud climb to a height of nearly 60 miles, while the plane itself capped out at a height of about 8.5 miles. But, they barely survived. When Tsar Bomba went off the Tupolev fell to a height of 3,300 feet above the surface before the pilot could regain control.
Eyewitness accounts are particularly horrifying. Per the Nuclear Weapon Archive, one Soviet cameraman said: “The sea of light spread under the hatch and even clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our aircraft emerged from between two cloud layers, and down below in the gap a huge bright orange ball was emerging … Slowly and silently it crept upwards.” Another observer far away heard “a remote, indistinct and heavy blow as if the earth has been killed!”
Most terrifyingly, a photographer at ground zero after the fact said, “The ground surface of the island has been leveled, swept, and licked so that it looks like a skating rink. The same goes for rocks … There is not a trace of unevenness in the ground … Everything in this area has been swept clean, scoured, melted, and blown away.”
