High Explosive Research was the British project to develop atomic bombs. It was a civil project, not a military one. Staff were drawn from and recruited into the Civil Service, and were paid Civil Service salaries. The first British atomic bomb was successfully tested in Operation Hurricane.
About High Explosive Research in brief
High Explosive Research was the British project to develop atomic bombs. It was a civil project, not a military one. Staff were drawn from and recruited into the Civil Service, and were paid Civil Service salaries. The first British atomic bomb was successfully tested in Operation Hurricane, during which it was detonated on board the frigate HMS Plym anchored off the Monte Bello Islands in Australia on 3 October 1952. The technology had been superseded by the American development of the hydrogen bomb, which was first tested in November 1952, only one month after Operation Hurricane. Britain went on to develop its own hydrogen bombs, which it first tests in 1957. The project concluded with the delivery of the first of its Blue Danube atomic bombs to Bomber Command in November 1953, but British hopes of a renewed nuclear Special Relationship with the United States were frustrated. The neutron was discovered by James Chadwick at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in February 1932. In April 1932, his Cavendish colleagues John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split lithium atoms with accelerated protons. Enrico Fermi and his team in Rome conducted experiments involving the bombardment of elements by slow neutrons, which produced heavier elements and isotopes. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at Hahn’s laboratory in Berlin-Dahlem bombarded uranium with slowed neutrons. By analogy with the division of biological cells, they named the process \”fission\”. The discovery of fission raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created.
The term was already familiar to the British public through the writings of H. G. Wells, in his 1913 novel The World Set Free. By February 1940, George Paget Thomson had failed to create a chain reaction in natural uranium, and he had decided that it was not worth pursuing. But at Birmingham, Oliphant’s team had reached a strikingly different conclusion. They calculated the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure-235, which would explode with the power of thousands of tons of dynamite. They found that instead of tons, as everyone had assumed, as little as 1 to 1,000 tons would suffice, and found that 10 kilograms would suffice. In July 1941, the Tizard Committee was established to investigate further research in uranium. It directed an intensive research effort in July 1941 to investigate the further development and production of uranium. By the end of that year, two German refugee scientists, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, had reached the conclusion that they could not work on the university’s secret projects because they lacked the necessary security clearance. A year later, the U.S. and Britain resumed nuclear weapons cooperation. In 1954, the first British nuclear weapons were tested, in Operation Danube, which took place off the coast of Australia in October 1953. The United States and the Soviet Union. began producing highly enriched uranium in 1954. The gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment facility at Capenhurst began producinghighly enriched uranium. in October 1950 and June 1951.
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