Laura Potter

The Trinity Nuclear Test, which took place on July 16th 1945, was the first ever detonation of a nuclear weapon and part of the Manhattan Project. The next nuclear explosions after Trinity, were Hiroshima (August 6th 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9th 1945). Nicknamed ‘The Gadget’, this bomb was an implosion-design plutonium fission device. The Trinity yield was approximately 20 kilotons (equivalent to 20KT of TNT). This is a 20pc jigsaw of a 20KT explosion.

Ivy King was detonated by the USA in 1952, on the Pacific atoll Enewetak. King was one of the shots from Operation Ivy. The Soviet Nuclear program was in full swing, and the Truman administration was concerned with making sure they had more powerful (more destructive) bombs than the USSR. Nuclear explosions up until the 1950s had been powered by pure-fission reactions (“Atomic Bombs”). Ivy King was the largest pure-fission device ever tested by the USA with a yield of 500 kilotons (equivalent to 500KT of TNT). This is a 500pc jigsaw of a 500KT explosion.

Once fission bombs reached their limits fusion bombs substantially raised the bar, and the largest detonation ever was Soviet device RDS-220. Known by various names, in the West it was christened the Tsar Bomba (King of Bombs). Dropped in 1961 from a Tu-95N "Bear A" strategic bomber, it exploded 4000m above the archipelago of Novaya Zemla (Northern Russia, Arctic Ocean). It was primarily a ‘show piece’, deployed by Russia to demonstrate their capacity directly to the Americans. Tsar was originally designed to unleash twice as much energy: the three stage mechanism was intentionally ‘dampened’ to reduce both the scale of the explosion and subsequent fallout effects. It released 50 megatons of energy (50 000 kilotons), was 2500 times bigger than Trinity, and 100 times the size of Ivy King. This 500pc jigsaw is 1% of a jigsaw of a 50 000KT explosion.

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