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The British hydrogen bomb programme demonstrated Britain's ability to produce thermonuclear weapons in the Operation Grapple nuclear tests in the Pacific, and led to the amendment of the McMahon Act. Since the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement , the US and the UK have cooperated extensively on nuclear security matters.
The bomb was hailed as a hydrogen bomb, and the truth that it was actually a large fission bomb was kept secret by the British government until the end of the Cold War. [135] [136] An Operational Requirement (OR1142) had been issued in 1955 for a thermonuclear warhead for a medium-range ballistic missile, which became Blue Streak. This was ...
British nuclear weapons are designed and developed by the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment. The United Kingdom has four Vanguard -class submarines armed with nuclear armed Trident missiles . The principle of operation is based on maintaining deterrent effect by always having at least one submarine at sea, and was designed during the Cold War ...
A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs , a more compact size, a lower mass, or a combination of these benefits.
Red Snow was a British thermonuclear weapon, [1] based on the US W28 (then called Mark 28) design used in the B28 thermonuclear bomb and AGM-28 Hound Dog missile. [2] The US W28 had yields of 70, 350, 1,100 and 1,450 kilotonnes of TNT (0.29, 1.46, 4.60 and 6.07 PJ) [3] and while Red Snow yields are still classified, declassified British documents indicate the existence of "kiloton Red Snow ...
A Blue Danube bomb. Blue Danube was the first operational British nuclear weapon.It also went by a variety of other names, including Smallboy, the Mk.1 Atom Bomb, Special Bomb and OR.1001, a reference to the Operational Requirement it was built to fill.
Operation Grapple was a set of four series of British nuclear weapons tests of early atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs carried out in 1957 and 1958 at Malden Island and Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the Pacific Ocean (modern Kiribati) as part of the British hydrogen bomb programme.
To test the effects of a ship-smuggled atomic bomb on a port (a threat of great concern to the British at the time), the bomb was exploded inside the hull of Plym, anchored 350 metres (1,150 ft) off Trimouille Island. The explosion occurred 2.7 metres (8 ft 10 in) below the water line and left a saucer-shaped crater on the seabed 6 metres (20 ...