10 Gargantuan Things Made Solely For Killing People

Imagine there's something you want to blow up. You have two options. One is to use a bomb that's just big enough, and place it accurately enough to destroy it and nothing else. The other is to use a bomb that obliterates everything within a huge area, and drop it vaguely near whatever is annoying you. The Soviets liked the second option, especially when it called for the biggest nuclear weapon the world has ever seen, and hopefully will ever see.

In 1961 the Soviet Union perpetrated arguably the grandest act of tackle-swinging in human history when they 'tested' (showed off) a nuclear bomb with a yield of 50 megatons and a potential of up to 100 megatons. A 'megaton', for the record, is an explosive yield equivalent to a million tons of TNT, a concept so immense it might as well be a kajillion gigabooms. They called it the 'Tsar Bomba' ('King Bomb') and it went off on an island in the Arctic circle, where it made a mushroom cloud 35 miles high and pushed the doomsday clock a few more seconds towards midnight.