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The pilots who dropped this bomb were told they had a 50/50 chance of coming home. Russia kept this footage secret for 59 years It's the biggest explosion humans have ever made, about 50 megatons. The shockwave still caught their plane and threw it down almost a kilometer. Watch the flash It was dropped on October 30, 1961, over Novaya Zemlya, an island in the Arctic. The bomb weighed about 27 tons and was 8 meters long. It didn't even fit inside the plane, so they removed the bomb bay doors and carried it half outside To give the crew time to escape, it fell on a giant parachute. The plane was painted white to reflect the heat It went off about 4 kilometers above the ground, thousands of times stronger than Hiroshima. By then the bomber was over 100 kilometers away, and the blast still caught it It was originally designed for 100 megatons. The engineers cut that in half, because the full version would have spread enormous fallout and left the crew no chance One of the physicists behind it, Andrei Sakharov, later fought against nuclear testing and won the Nobel Peace Prize