Those are the kind of facts that would make Guy Fawkes cum in his pants, all over his shitty barrels of gunpowder and on pretty much any unsullied surface in sight. The Cold War was kind of a big deal at this point, so obviously the Russians freaked THE FUCK out, immediately planning the most ludicrously obnoxious explosion EVER, which they succeeded in doing with their ‘Tsar Bomba’ in ‘61. It was originally meant to be 100,000 cunting kilo tonnes big, but then the Russians had second thoughts (possibly because they realised they could fvck everything up, forever, possibly because they just didn’t have the balls for it) and scaled it down to a barely impressive 57,000Kt (just 10x the power of all the conventional munitions used in WW2… yawn). It is, to this day, the biggest man-made nuclear explosion ever created. It weighed 27 tonnes and created a mushroom cloud 40 miles high. It registered 8.1 on the Richter scale (and the shockwave could even be measured on it’s THIRD passage around the Earth) and smashed windows almost 600 miles away. Makes those crappy little Catherine wheels (you know, the ones your dad always nails to the tree so badly they won’t even spin) look a bit… well, a bit shit. It even made the Russians crap their pants so badly they only made one of them.

The Russians made this pretty sweet film of the whole thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMYYEsKvHvk

Let us not, however, forget Mother Nature in all of this. She was fvcking shit up on a huge scale before it was even fashionable to be fvcking shit up. In 1908 a MASSIVE, UNEXPLAINED explosion tore through Siberia in what is ominously referred to as the ‘Tunguska Event’. ‘Event’ is a bit of a soft word to describe what happened – it was so monumentally fvcking huge that it flattened 750 square miles of forests, around 80 million trees, and left a pretty little lake behind. Recently a bunch of quite reputable, sane, people had a butcher’s and have decided that what happened was that a meteor exploded a few miles above the Earth’s surface, creating an air-burst explosion…. Which is pretty cool. This still hasn’t stopped complete fvcking wack-jobs hijacking the whole thing and making it into some weird conspiracy theory. Less reputable claims have been made about how it all happened, such as a ‘geophysical hypothesis’ involving natural gas deposits – which amounts to no more than the Earth basically lighting one of it’s own farts. Some even believe — and I shit you not — that it was created by a black hole passing through Earth. Now, I don’t have a PhD in Physics, but even I know that is total bullshit.

Anyway, it’s hard to know really how big the explosion was, considering it happened in Siberia 100 years ago, but it’s thought to be around 15,000Kt big. Although that’s only a third of the Tsar Bomba it still makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki look a little less ‘BOOM’ and a little more ‘Boom Boom Pow’. Unfortunately that also means there’s no super-awesome video of it, but here’s a photo of the crater it left behind:

If you’ve quite literally got 10 minutes to burn, as in, you quite literally have NOTHING more valuable to do with your time, I’d strongly recommend watching the video below showing the location of every single nuclear device activated between 1945 and 1998. Surprisingly (perhaps) the figure is over TWO THOUSAND.

☛ Read Next: The Creator of the Doomsday Clock Has Died