Operation Mosaic The first British atomic bomb was tested in Operation Hurricane at the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia on 3 October 1952. Britain thereby became the third nuclear power after the United States and the Soviet Union, but just four weeks after Operation Hurricane, the United States successfully demonstrated a hydrogen bomb. The technology mastered in Operation Hurricane was six years old, and with the hydrogen bomb in hand, the US Congress saw no benefit in renewing cooperation with the UK. All the while Britain strove for independence, at the same time it sought interdependence in the form of a
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