America's deadliest nuclear weapon after Donald Trump made chilling claim about 'greatest threat to humanity'

It's almost 80 years since the first ever nuclear bomb was detonated, with the Trinity test taking place on 16 July 1945.

The following month two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Second World War ended to usher in an era of Cold War.

With the threat of the atomic bomb hanging over any potential conflict between the world's superpowers, what followed was decades of tension with proxy wars, invasions of non-nuclear powers and the fear that the world could end at any moment.

The human race came close a few times due to false alarms, including in 1983 when malfunctioning Soviet equipment blared with the early warning that the US had launched nuclear weapons at them.

Fortunately for the entire planet, the Soviet officer on duty at the time, a man named Stanislav Petrov, thought it was unlikely that the US would fire only five missiles at them and decided to wait for more information, and so our entire species narrowly avoided being wiped out due to a malfunctioning computer.

The B83 is the most powerful nuclear bomb the US has (U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Ken Hammond)

Sadly the threat of nuclear war has never completely gone away and rising tensions in the world, fuelled in no small part by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have brought the issue to the forefront of people's minds again.

Its the country with the most nuclear weapons in the world, and finding a way to stop it from invading other countries without triggering a nuclear war is not easy.

US President Donald Trump has said that nuclear weapons are the 'greatest threat to humanity' and that people shouldn't be seeing climate change as the 'biggest existential threat' to our existence.

While Russia has the most nuclear weapons in the world with over 5,000 warheads, the US is not far behind with a similar amount, and the most powerful bomb in its arsenal is many magnitudes more devastating than the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.

According to Newsweek, if a B83 was dropped it would vaporise everything in a radius of about two miles in a cataclysmic fireball and cause 'massive destruction' for about 6.5 miles.

Donald Trump says nuclear weapons are the 'greatest threat to humanity', and as US president he's got the second largest stockpile (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The B83 is a 'dumb' bomb, meaning it is unguided, but if it was dropped it'd deliver a 1.2 megaton blast which is the most powerful explosion the US can inflict since it dismantled the last of the nine megaton B53 bombs in 2011.

Damage from the blast would extend to almost 17 miles away from the point the bomb was dropped, and people in a 19-mile radius could expect to suffer third-degree radiation burns.

The damage done by the bomb wouldn't just extend to the initial blast, as the radiation would spread for miles poisoning and polluting everything in its path.

All in all it would be better if this weapon was never actually used, and there have been efforts to phase the destructive weapons out of America's nuclear arsenal.

Plans have been made to retire the B83, though Trump slowed those down in his first term and his administration said they would keep the weapon 'until a suitable replacement is identified'.