Operation Totem status, the British government restarted its own development effort, which was given the cover name "High Explosive Research". The first British atomic bomb was tested in Operation Hurricane at the Montebello Islands in Western Australia on 3 October 1952. 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. The plutonium used in the original Hurricane device was produced in the nuclear reactor at Windscale, but the Windscale Piles did not have anything like the capacity to provide sufficient material for the British government's planned weapons
Test No. 6 so great that the Soviet Union ceased all assistance to China. Thus, the Number 6 test was indeed an independent endeavor, after the induced military and economic sanctions enacted by the superpowers at the time, the United States and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, a comparison of other fission-to-fusion timespans may be instructive. The time between the U.S.'s first atomic test and its first hydrogen bomb test was 86 months, for the USSR it was 75 months, for the UK 66 months and later for France, 105 months. The goal of China was to produce a thermonuclear device of at least