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Here's how North Korea's nuclear bomb tests stack up against the US's

The hydrogen bomb nicknamed Castle Bravo had the highest energy of any the US ever tested, and that detonation was all the way back in 1954.

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It exploded with the power of 15,000,000 tons of TNT.

So how do North Korea's nuclear bombs compare to the Castle Bravo and other bombs the US has detonated?

It's still unknown exactly how big the nuclear weapon that North Korea tested on Jan. 6, 2015 was, but the country claims it was a "miniature hydrogen bomb."

Castle Bravo Blast nuclear bomb mushroom cloud
The Castle Bravo blast on the island of Bikini Atoll in 1954. US Department of Energy

North Korea's previous test, in 2013, exploded at a power of 6,000 tons of TNT. Previous tests — in 2006 and 2009 — were even smaller.

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Hydrogen bombs are much more powerful than atomic bombs, and so even a "miniature" H-bomb would have been much more powerful than previous tests.

That being said, the White House has doubts that this latest test was actually a hydrogen bomb at all. Based on readouts from earthquake-detection equipment, they say it was likely much smaller in energy.

No matter what, this bomb is much smaller than many of those the US tested from 1945-1992. Even the first atomic bomb the US ever detonated was equivalent to 18,600 tons of TNT.

US_nuclear_weapons_yield to weight_comparison
Bombs that the US still has in its stockpile are in yellow and red. The black dots are bombs that the US tested but has since dismantled. Wikimedia Commons

Super-powerful nukes like the Castle Bravo and the B53 bunker-buster are no longer in the US arsenal — the last of the B53 bombs were dismantled in 2011, Wired reported.

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The nuclear weapons in the US stockpile these days — which still number around 7,200 — are generally smaller. They are typically in the 100,000-ton range, so still likely much bigger than North Korea's latest test.

Modern nuclear weapons are smaller and more easily aimed at strategic targets, creating less collateral damage than the mega bombs could have had.

The infographic below, designed by Maximilian Bode and posted on fastcodesign.com illustrates the relative power of American nuclear bombs.

(As a reminder, North Korea's previous test detonated at 6 kilotons of power, much smaller than the Little Boy bomb. The latest test is likely stronger, but we can't say for sure where it falls on this chart.)

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Each pink block represents a ton of TNT. 1,000 pink blocks represents a kiloton, which is shown as a red block:

nuclear bomb power
fastcodesign.com

A previous version of this post was published by Ashley Lutz.

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