John Sheridan had his crew seeded several nearby asteroids with a trio of two-megaton tactical nuclear warheads, then sent out a distress call to lure the Black Star back to their position.
On November 1, 1952, the Teller-Ulam configuration was tested in the "Ivy Mike" shot at an island in the Enewetak atoll, with a yield of 10.4 megatons (over 450 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II).
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Detonated in 1953 with a yield equivalent to 400 kilotons of TNT (only 15%–20% from fusion), the Sloika device did, however, have the advantage of being a weapon which could actually be delivered to a military target, unlike the "Ivy Mike" device, though it was never widely deployed.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, 59 of the RAF missiles, with their W49 1.44 megaton thermonuclear warheads, were brought to operational readiness.
The approximate energy released when the largest fragment of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 impacted Jupiter was estimated to be equal to 6 million megatons (or 6 trillion tons) of TNT.
TNT | TNT (TV channel) | TNT equivalent | TNT (TV network) | TNT (band) | Wired Equivalent Privacy | Twenty-foot equivalent unit | NASCAR on TNT | 35 mm equivalent focal length | TNT's NASCAR coverage | TNT Serie | TNT (Russian TV channel) | TNT N.V. | TNT (network) | TNT Airways | Normal curve equivalent | Firefly (TNT album) | Barrel of oil equivalent |
On November 16, 1952 at 11:30 local time (23:30 GMT) a B-36H bomber dropped the bomb over a point 2,000 feet (610 m) north of Runit Island in the Enewetak atoll, resulting in a 500 kiloton explosion at 1,480 feet (450 m).
It is calculated that the impact released energy equaling 250 megatons of TNT and occurred when this area was probably covered by a shallow sea.