Nuclear weapons tests in Australia known at the time as Christmas Island (not to be confused with Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean) between 1957 and 1958. These were airbursts mostly occurring over water or suspended a few hundred metres above the ground by balloon. In Australia there were three sites. Testing was carried out between 1952 and 1957 and was mostly done at the surface. A few hundred smaller scale tests were conducted at both Emu Field and Maralinga between 1953 and 1963. Two separate atomic test projects occurred at the islands, the first being Operation Hurricane and the second being Operation Mosaic The
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