The Biggest Guns Ever Built

There’s a special kind of awe reserved for a gun that’s simply too big. A rifle you can barely lift. A revolver that fires an elephant cartridge. A cannon the size of a house that flung seven-ton shells over the horizon.

These are the biggest guns ever built, from the largest firearms a person can actually hold up to the monster artillery of the world wars. We will start with the ones you could theoretically own and work our way up to the truly absurd. The figures below are drawn from ordnance records and manufacturer specs, cross-checked where sources disagree.

The biggest revolver: the Pfeifer-Zeliska .600 Nitro Express

The Pfeifer-Zeliska is the largest production revolver on earth. It’s chambered in .600 Nitro Express, a cartridge designed to stop charging elephants, and the whole gun weighs about 13 pounds. The cylinder alone weighs four and a half.

It is nearly two feet long, costs north of $17,000, and launches a 900-grain slug. This isn’t a gun you carry. It’s a gun you brace against and survive. For more sensible heavy hitters, see the most powerful handguns you can actually shoot.

The biggest rifle: the .950 JDJ

The .950 JDJ is the largest commercially available rifle cartridge in the world, built around a case derived from a 20mm Vulcan cannon round. The bullet weighs 3,600 grains, more than half a pound, and the rifle needed to tame it weighs between 85 and 120 pounds.

Only three of these rifles were ever made. Even at over a hundred pounds, a .950 JDJ generates enough recoil to injure the shooter if fired wrong, because it produces roughly three times the muzzle energy of a .50 BMG. It exists mostly to prove it can. Firing one is less like shooting and more like setting off a small explosion you happen to be holding onto.

The Tsar Cannon: a 40-ton monument

Cast in Moscow in 1586, the Tsar Cannon has an 890-millimeter bore, making it one of the largest-caliber artillery pieces ever built. It weighs around 40 tons and sits in the Kremlin to this day.

For all its size, it was never fired in war. It was built partly as a genuine weapon and partly as a statement of Russian power, a piece of artillery designed to intimidate anyone who saw it. In that, at least, it succeeded.

Battleship guns: the 18.1-inch monsters of the Yamato

The largest naval guns ever mounted on a warship belonged to the Japanese battleship Yamato. Each fired an 18.1-inch shell weighing over 3,200 pounds to a range of more than 25 miles. A single gun turret weighed as much as a destroyer.

The American Iowa-class battleships answered with 16-inch guns firing 2,700-pound shells. Interestingly, the smaller American shell, thanks to clever design, achieved penetration comparable to the bigger Japanese one. Size, even here, wasn’t quite everything.

The Paris Gun: shelling a city from 80 miles away

In 1918, Germany built a gun so long-ranged it seemed like science fiction. The Paris Gun bombarded Paris from about 80 miles away, and its shells flew so high, around 25 miles up, that they were the first human-made objects to reach the stratosphere.

The gunners actually had to account for the rotation of the Earth when they aimed. Militarily it was nearly useless, with a tiny payload and a barrel that wore out after a few dozen shots, but as a feat of engineering it was decades ahead of its time. It killed 256 people over its campaign, which made it a weapon of terror far more than one of tactics. Don’t confuse it with Big Bertha, which was a different German gun entirely.

Little David: the largest bore ever built

By sheer bore diameter, the largest gun ever built is an American one. Little David, a WWII siege mortar developed to crack Japanese fortifications, had a 36-inch bore and fired shells weighing over 3,600 pounds.

The war ended before it was ever used in combat. And here’s the important caveat: Little David holds the record for largest caliber, but it was nowhere near the biggest gun overall. That title belongs to a German giant.

Schwerer Gustav: the heaviest gun ever made

The Schwerer Gustav is the king of them all. Built by Krupp for Nazi Germany, this railway gun had an 80-centimeter bore, weighed around 1,350 tons, and fired armor-piercing shells weighing up to seven tons. It ran on a double set of railway tracks and needed a crew of around 250 men just to operate, with thousands more to lay the track and guard it. A near-identical sister gun, named Dora, was also built, though it saw little real use.

It actually saw combat, at the siege of Sevastopol in 1942, where a single shell reportedly punched 100 feet through earth and rock to destroy an underground Soviet ammunition store. It’s the largest-caliber rifled weapon ever used in battle and the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built. After that, there was simply nowhere bigger to go.

What the biggest guns ever built tell us

Almost none of these monsters were practical. The Tsar Cannon never fired in anger, Little David missed its war, and the Paris Gun could barely hit a city. They were built to prove a point as much as to win a battle.

That is the strange truth about the biggest guns ever built. Most of them were monuments to ambition first and weapons second. If you like raw power, see the most powerful rifles and the most famous guns in history.

Keep exploring Cool Guns

• The 10 Most Expensive Guns Ever Sold
• The Strangest Military Weapons Ever Built
• The 7 Rarest Production Guns in the World
• The 10 Most Famous Guns in History