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

thermonuclear Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei combine to form a larger nuclei, nuclei/neutron by-products. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of ener ...

test, conducted on October 20, 1961, in

Mityushikha Bay Mityushikha Bay () is a bay on Severny Island in Novaya Zemlya, Russia. Nuclear tests were conducted in 1961 in the area of the bay, including the 58 megaton yield Tsar Bomba. Geography It is a long fjord open to the west near the SW end of the ...

Severny Island Severny 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 von Lütke, who explored it. It lies approximately 400 km north of th ...

Novaya Zemlya Novaya Zemlya (, also , ; , ; ), also spelled , 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, considered the extreme points of Europe ...

. The test was conducted by the

Northern Fleet The Northern Fleet (, ''Severnyy flot'') is the Naval fleet, fleet of the Russian Navy in the Arctic. According to the Russian ministry of defence: "The Northern Fleet dates its history back to a squadron created in 1733 to protect the terri ...

. 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 ; , ; ) is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, located off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia and divided between Norwegian and Russian territorial waters.World Wildlife Fund, 2008. It was known earlier among Russi ...

, 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. A ton of TNT equivalent is a unit of energy defined by convention to be (). It is the approximate energy released in the det ...

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 Russia 1961 in military history Explosions in 1961 Novaya Zemlya October 1961 in Europe

See also

References