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
Atomic clock of using atomic transitions to measure time was suggested by Lord Kelvin in 1879. Magnetic resonance, developed in the 1930s by Isidor Rabi, became the practical method for doing this. In 1945, Rabi first publicly suggested that atomic beam magnetic resonance might be used as the basis of a clock. The first atomic clock was an ammonia absorption line device at 23870.1 MHz built in 1949 at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now NIST). It was less accurate than existing quartz clocks, but served to demonstrate the concept. The first accurate atomic clock, a caesium standard based on