Operation Hurricane were considered. The Admiralty suggested that the Monte Bello Islands might be suitable, so the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee, sent a request to the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies. The Australian government formally agreed to the islands being used as a nuclear test site in May 1951. In February 1952, Attlee's successor, Winston Churchill, announced in the House of Commons that the first British atomic bomb test would occur in Australia before the end of the year. A small fleet was assembled for Operation Hurricane under the command of Rear Admiral A. D. Torlesse; it
History of the Teller–Ulam design "secret"), the United States agreed to exchange some of its nuclear designs with Great Britain, leading to the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. The People's Republic of China detonated its first device using a Teller–Ulam design June 1967 ("Test No. 6"), a mere 32 months after detonating its first fission weapon (the shortest fission-to-fusion development yet known), with a yield of 3.3 Mt. Little is known about the Chinese thermonuclear program, however. Very little is known about the French development of the Teller–Ulam design beyond the fact that they detonated a 2.6 Mt device in the "Canopus" test in August