Nuclear weapons and the United Kingdom weapons to be a joint discovery, but the American Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) restricted other countries, including the UK, from access to information about nuclear weapons. Fearing the loss of Britain's great power status, the UK resumed its own project, now codenamed High Explosive Research. On 3 October 1952, it detonated an atomic bomb in the Monte Bello Islands of Western Australia in Operation Hurricane. Eleven more British nuclear weapons tests in Australia were carried out over the following decade, including seven British nuclear tests at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957. The British hydrogen bomb programme demonstrated
Agathe (atomic test) Agathe (atomic test) Agathe (aka Agate) was the name of the first French nuclear underground test. It was an atomic bomb detonated in the Hoggar mount (near In Ekker) of the then French Sahara desert on November 21, 1961, during the Algerian War (1954–62). Agathe was the first test of the jewel designation series running from 1961 until 1966. Minor and major incidents occurred during these experiments, the most important being the Beryl incident on May 1, 1962, where the nine militarymen of the "621ème Groupe d'Armes Spéciales" unit were heavily contaminated (600 mSv) as portrayed in the 2006 docudrama