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
Operation Sandstone delivered to San Pedro, California, and loaded on the weapon assembly ship USS "Curtiss", in February 1948, but the Atomic Energy Commission only gave permission for the expenditure of three cores in the tests. The naval forces were organized as Task Group 7.3. It consisted of: Source: Berkhouse "et al", "Operation Sandstone", p. 40 In September 1947, Hull, Russell, who was designated test director on October 14, and Joint Task Force 7's scientific director, Darol K. Froman from the Los Alamos Laboratories, set out with a group of scientists and military officers to examine various proposed test sites in the