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.
Operation Snowball (test) Operation Snowball (test) Operation Snowball was a conventional explosive test to obtain information on nuclear weapon detonations run by the Defence Research Board with participation from the United Kingdom and United States. A detonation of of TNT was used to study the resulting phenomena. The test was held at the Suffield Experimental Station in Alberta and was the largest ever man-made, non-accidental explosion in Canada. The test was also the first of its kind using a stacked TNT block hemisphere of such magnitude, a method repeated in six subsequent tests such as Operation Sailor Hat and Prairie Flat. The test