Animation comparing the sizes of famous explosions sends shivers down viewers’ spines

A YouTube video comparing the relative sizes of different explosions has amazed people with its sheer scale.

From a small firecracker all the way to a massive nuclear bomb called the Tsar Bomba, it really puts things in perspective.

The video comes from a YouTube channel called Red Side, which specializes in CGI comparisons of different things, and is a really effective showcase:

After the comparatively small start, land mines are followed by napalm bombs and then a Tomahawk missile, dropped next to the Statue of Liberty to help give a sense of scale.

Pretty soon, the video shows the size of a MOAB, which is officially called a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but also known as the 'Mother Of All Bombs'.

This is far from the biggest, though, and then we get to see what it would be like if a neutron bomb exploded.

We then see the size of the cloud thrown up by Little Boy, the bomb dropped over Hiroshima by the US in 1945.

By this point, the camera has had to zoom back to be 10km from the bomb site in order to capture the whole thing, and it keeps rewinding to show Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

Next up is the B83, the most powerful nuclear bomb in the US armory - one that has never been dropped - but even that is dwarfed by Castle Bravo, a staggering 15-megaton nuclear test conducted by Russia in 1954.

We then see Tsar Bomba at a distance of 80km - the final explosion in the video, and the biggest bomb ever created in terms of power, with roughly 50 megatons of power when it was tested by Russia in the early 1960s.

Red Side/YouTube

The size of the mushroom clouds from these explosions is astonishing when you pay attention to the distance, too, and people in the comments under the video have expressed their shock at the sight of them.

One person wrote: "The last one literally sends a shiver down my spine. Just imagine witnessing an explosion like that in the distance, and not feeling the shockwave at first, only to be blown away moments later".

Another comment points out: "It's insane that the Tsar Bomba originally had double the power before they reduced it by half before they tested it." They're correct, too - that final bomb was initially designed to half a yield of 100 megatons of power, but ended up being 50 megatons because the risks associated with the bigger bomb were seen as being just too high.