Operation Grapple with the American Manhattan Project in August 1943. Many of Britain's top scientists participated in the British contribution to the Manhattan Project. After the war, fearing that Britain would lose its great power status, the British government resumed the atomic bomb development effort, now codenamed High Explosive Research. The successful test of an atomic bomb in Operation Hurricane in October 1952 represented an extraordinary scientific and technological achievement, but Britain was still several years behind the United States in nuclear weapons technology. In July 1954, the Cabinet decided to develop the hydrogen bomb. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority Atomic
History of the Teller–Ulam design "secret"), the United States agreed to exchange some of its nuclear designs with Great Britain, leading to the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. The People's Republic of China detonated its first device using a Teller–Ulam design June 1967 ("Test No. 6"), a mere 32 months after detonating its first fission weapon (the shortest fission-to-fusion development yet known), with a yield of 3.3 Mt. Little is known about the Chinese thermonuclear program, however. Very little is known about the French development of the Teller–Ulam design beyond the fact that they detonated a 2.6 Mt device in the "Canopus" test in August