Nuclear fission the Manhattan Project during World War II (September 1, 1939 – September 2, 1945) carried out most of the early scientific work on fission chain reactions, culminating in the three events involving fission bombs that occurred during the war. The first fission bomb, codenamed "The Gadget", was detonated during the Trinity Test in the desert of New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Two other fission bombs, codenamed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", were used in combat against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. Even the first fission bombs were thousands of
Nuclear arms race Vulcan, SEPECAT Jaguar, Panavia Tornado and several other Royal Air Force strike aircraft carrying WE.177 gravity bomb provided the air deterrent. France became the fourth nation to possess nuclear weapons on February 13, 1960, when the atomic bomb "Gerboise Bleue" was detonated in Algeria, then still a French colony [Formally a part of the Metropolitan France.] France began making plans for a nuclear-weapons program shortly after the Second World War, but the program did not actually begin until the late 1950s. Eight years later, France conducted its first thermonuclear test above Fangatuafa Atoll. It had a yield of 2.6 megatons.