Free Republic

[Andrey] Sakharov [a Soviet dissident and one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb] gave a bitter description of this habitual psychological attitude in his Memoires, when he tried to find a military application for the Tsar Bomb: After testing the "big" device I was worried that it didn't have a good carrier (bombers didn't count because they're easy to shoot down), in other words, in the military sense we were working in vain. I decided that an effective carrier could be a big torpedo fired from a submarine. I imagined that a nuclear jet engine that converted water...

Maj. Andrei Durnovtsev, a Soviet air force pilot and commander of a Tu-95 Bear bomber, holds a dubious honor in the history of the Cold War. Durnovtsev flew the aircraft that dropped the most powerful nuclear bomb ever. It had an explosive force of 50 megatons, or more than 3,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima weapon. Over the years, historians identified many names for the test bomb.