Operation Hurricane Operation Hurricane Operation Hurricane was the test of the first UK atomic device, on 3 October 1952. A plutonium implosion device was detonated in the lagoon in the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia. With the success of Operation Hurricane, Britain became the third nuclear power after the United States and the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, Britain commenced a nuclear weapons project, known as Tube Alloys, but the 1943 Quebec Agreement merged it with the American Manhattan Project. Several key British scientists worked as part of the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, but after the war
Soviet atomic bomb project (including those now in Kazakhstan). The uranium for the Soviet nuclear weapons program came from mine production in the following countries, RDS-1, the first Soviet atomic test was internally code-named "First Lightning" ("Первая молния", or Pervaya Molniya) August 29, 1949, and was code-named by the Americans as "Joe 1". The design was very similar to the first US "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design. On September 24, 1951, the 38.3 kiloton device RDS-2 was tested based on a tritium "boosted" uranium implosion device with a levitated core. This test was code named "Joe 2" by the