British nuclear testing in the United States would be foregone, and the Americans were under no obligation to make the test site available for subsequent tests. Also, as Lord Cherwell noted, an American test meant that "in the lamentable event of the bomb failing to detonate, we should look very foolish indeed." In the end, Monte Bello was chosen, and the first British atomic bomb was tested there in Operation Hurricane on 3 October 1952. The next British test series, Operation Totem, was conducted at Emu Field in South Australia, but at their conclusion, the British government formally requested a permanent testing site from the Australian government,
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