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
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