Tsar Bomba
"The terrifying thought is how nuclear weapons may have developed since the Cold War; they could be far more powerful."
Actually no. Experience has shown that nuclear weapons don't scale. A bomb with twice the yield won't do twice the damage because of the inverse square law. Building huge monstrosities like the Tsar Bomba is just a waste of plutonium, and the builders knew that full well. It was honestly little more than a publicity stunt.
The real nightmare apocalypse-tech is MIRV: Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicles. Basically a single missile carries multiple warheads of about 5 megatons each, mounted to a "bus", a simple spacecraft with thrusters that allow it to reposition during the ballistic portion of its trajectory. It orients itself to a target and releases a warhead, re-orients, releases another warhead on a different trajectory, and so on. This basically results in a hailstorm of warheads spread over an area that will result in far more destruction than any single bomb could ever practically be expected to deliver. Basically it's a nuclear cluster bomb.
Sleep soundly!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
