—the technicians had to stay in the sealed blockhouse for much longer until the detonation effects dissipated. —
Wasn’t this the test shot where they had to evacuate and suddenly realized they didn’t have any protective clothing at all? They had to high-tail it out of there with sheets wrapped around their bodies?
Saw that on a program about the race for the ‘superbomb’. The Sovs lit one off in the arctic circle that was 50 megatons. Sakharov said while they could have went higher, any higher tonnage was a waste, because the fireball would be taller than the Earth’s atmosphere.
When the Russians tested Tsar Bomba, they were actually VERY lucky the yield of the bomb was only 50 MT--had it been the full 100 MT, there was a very high chance the plane that dropped the bomb would have been destroyed by the blast effects of the 100 MT blast.
The most powerful nuclear weapon fielded by the USA was the B41 gravity bomb, which had a yield of 25 MT. There was serious studies to add another detonation "stage" to the weapon to 45 MT, but given the safety issues of such a big explosion, the proposal never became a real weapon. The most powerful widely used nuclear weapon we had was the B53, which had a yield of 9 MT and just only retired in the last few years; this bomb in warhead form was the device used on the Titan II missile.