Windscale Piles for processing in January 1952, and Tom Tuohy retrieved the first sample of British plutonium on 28 March 1952. Enough Windscale plutonium for an atomic bomb was delivered to the weapons division at Aldermaston in August, and Britain's first nuclear device was successfully detonated in the Operation Hurricane test in the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia on 3 October 1952. Wigner energy, if allowed to accumulate, could escape spontaneously in a powerful rush of heat. On 7 May 1952, Pile No. 2 experienced a mysterious rise in core temperature despite the fact that the pile had been shut down.
Atomic Age Atomic Age The Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear ("atomic") bomb, "Trinity", on July 16, 1945, during World War II. Although nuclear chain reactions had been hypothesized in 1933 and the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1) had taken place in December 1942, the Trinity test and the ensuing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II represented the first large-scale use of nuclear technology and ushered in profound changes in sociopolitical thinking and the course of technology development. While atomic power