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On This Day: Britain tests its first atom bomb

The device, which was like the one the Americans dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, was detonated three years after the Soviet Union had detonated their own similar weapon

On This Day: Britain tests its first atom bomb

OCTOBER 3, 1952: Britain became the third nuclear power after testing its first atom bomb off the coast of Australia on this day in 1952.

The device, which was like the one the Americans dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, was detonated three years after the Soviet Union had detonated their own similar weapon.

A British Pathé newsreel showed the historic explosion, which took place in the lagoon between the Montebello Islands 80 miles west of the Australian mainland.

It first filmed the preparations taking place, including landing hundreds of soldiers and sailors on the usually uninhabited and sun-scorched outcrops.

Scientists, led by Dr William Penney, then left the blast site and sailed 10 miles away to watch the test, which had been codenamed Operation Hurricane.

Then, after watching a clock tick down, an enormous explosion erupts as thousands of tons of earth and water are catapulted into the air by the plutonium-fuelled device.

Scientists and servicemen on board HMS Campania are filmed keeping their backs to the fierce bomb blast, which could blind them if they turned the other way.

Then, after two minutes, they were able to turn around and see the giant mushroom cloud rising from the explosion, which had vaporised the ship carrying the weapon.

The bomb, which was developed by British experts who had also worked on the U.S. Manhattan Project during World War II, was almost identical to America’s Fat Boy.

It left the British public in a state of awe and fear since it demonstrated the skill of the country’s scientists and ensured Soviet nuclear weapons would be targeted at the UK.

Yet, despite the feat, the UK’s 30-kiloton bomb was already well behind America and its communist arch rival in terms of atomic technology.

Within a month of Operation Hurricane, the U.S. had tested the world’s first hydrogen bomb that was 1,000 times more powerful than Britain’s pure-fission device.

The Soviet Union followed suit by detonating a similar thermo-nuclear weapon in August 1953 as the Cold War intensified.

Britain eventually produced its own H-bomb in May 1957 – which prompted the U.S. to finally share its nuclear secrets.

But the U.S. and Soviet Union continued to outstrip the UK in their race to produce ever more devastating atomic weapons.

However, the Americans nearly always had the edge due to their powerhouse economy.

The U.S. has spent $8.5trillion dollars in modern terms on nuclear development and produced 70,000 warheads – more than the rest of the world combined.

The Soviet Union’s has made more than 55,000 – many of which were inherited by Russia after the communist superpower’s collapse in 1993.

Britain has built a total of 835 bombs while France, which developed its first nuclear weapon in 1960, developed 1,100 warheads.

China, which followed suit in 1964, has built around 600.

Since then India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea have successfully developed and tested nuclear weapons, but they have less than 500 warheads between them.