It was, physically, very similar in shape to the ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ bombs which had devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade-and-a-half earlier.

The bomb was 8m long (26ft), had a diameter of nearly 2.6m (7ft) and weighed more than 27 tonnes. The Tu-95 carried an enormous bomb underneath it, a device too large to fit inside the aircraft’s internal bomb-bay, where such munitions would usually be carried. The pilot who stole a secret Soviet fighter jetīut nothing the Soviet Union had tested would compare to this. The secret nuclear bunker built as the UK’s last hope In the intervening years, their test programme had surged in leaps and starts, detonating more than 80 devices in 1958 alone, the Soviet tested 36 nuclear bombs. On 29 August 1949, the Soviets had tested their first nuclear device – known as ‘Joe-1’ in the West – on the remote steppes on what is now Kazakhstan, using intelligence gleaned from infiltrating the US’s atomic bomb programme. And the Soviets, presented with a rivalry against the world’s only nuclear superpower, had only one option – to catch up. World War Two had placed the US and USSR in the same camp, but the post-war period had seen relations chill and then freeze. The last decade had seen enormous strides in Soviet nuclear research. The Tu-95 was a specially modified version of a type that had come into service a few years earlier a huge, swept-wing, four-engined monster tasked with carrying Russia’s arsenal of nuclear bombs. On the morning of 30 October 1961, a Soviet Tu-95 bomber took off from Olenya airfield in the Kola Peninsula in the far north of Russia.

This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2017” collection.

Nuke them till they glow