Raduga (in Russian ''Радуга'', ''Rainbow'') is the codename of a Soviet

thermonuclear Thermonuclear fusion is the process of atomic nuclei combining or “fusing” using high temperatures to drive them close enough together for this to become possible. There are two forms of thermonuclear fusion: ''uncontrolled'', in which the re ...

test, conducted on October 20, 1961, in

Mityushikha Bay Mityushikha Bay (russian: Губа Митюшиха) is a bay on Severny Island in Novaya Zemlya, Russia. Nuclear tests were conducted in 1961 in the area of the bay. Geography It is a long fjord open to the west near the SW end of the island, j ...

Severny Island Severny Island (russian: Се́верный о́стров, Severnyy ostrov, Northern Island) is a Russian Arctic island. It is the northern island of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. It was historically called Lütke Land after Friedrich Benjamin ...

Novaya Zemlya Novaya Zemlya (, also , ; rus, Но́вая Земля́, p=ˈnovəjə zʲɪmˈlʲa, ) is an archipelago in northern Russia. It is situated in the Arctic Ocean, in the extreme northeast of Europe, with Cape Flissingsky, on the northern island ...

. The test was conducted by the

Northern Fleet Severnyy flot , image = Great emblem of the Northern Fleet.svg , image_size = 150px , caption = Northern Fleet's great emblem , start_date = June 1, 1733; Sov ...

. An R-13 missile with a thermonuclear warhead was fired from the submarine K-102. When the submarine reached the specified point in the

Barents Sea The Barents Sea ( , also ; no, Barentshavet, ; russian: Баренцево море, Barentsevo More) is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, located off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia and divided between Norwegian and Russian ter ...

, she could not establish her position due to cloudiness and snowfall. A R-13 missile without a nuclear warhead was fired first, which missed the aiming point by a wide margin. It was decided to continue the test in spite of bad weather. The second missile performed better and its miss distance was less than the previous one, and detonated at height, yielding 1.45

megatons TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. The is a unit of energy defined by that convention to be , which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a m ...

References

*
Atomicforum: Database of Russian Atmospheric Nuclear Tests (compiled in web.archive.org)
{{coord, 73.8700, N, 54.3500, E, source:wikidata, display=title Soviet nuclear weapons testing 1961 in the Soviet Union 1961 in military history Explosions in 1961 Novaya Zemlya October 1961 events in Europe

See also

References