Operation Totem at Maralinga was held in September 1956, with the Operation Buffalo series. Operation Totem Operation Totem was a pair of British atmospheric nuclear tests which took place at Emu Field in South Australia on 15 October 1953. They followed the Operation Hurricane test of the first British atomic bomb, which had taken place at the Montebello Islands a year previously. The main purpose of the trial was to determine the acceptable limit on the amount of plutonium-240 which could be present in a bomb. In addition to the two main tests, there was a series of five subcritical tests. These
Soviet atomic bomb project CIA. RDS-3 was the third Soviet atomic bomb. On October 18, 1951, the 41.2 kiloton device was detonated - a boosted weapon using a composite construction of levitated plutonium core and a uranium-235 shell. Code named "Joe 3" in the USA, this was the first Soviet air-dropped bomb test. Released at an altitude of 10 km, it detonated 400 meters above the ground. RDS-4 represented a branch of research on small tactical weapons. It was a boosted fission device using plutonium in a "levitated" core design. The first test was an air drop on August 23, 1953, yielding 28 kilotons.