Chinese nuclear test No. 6
Encyclopedia
Test No. 6 is the codename for the China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

's first test of a three-staged thermonuclear device and, also its sixth nuclear weapons test
Nuclear testing
Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine the effectiveness, yield and explosive capability of nuclear weapons. Throughout the twentieth century, most nations that have developed nuclear weapons have tested them...

. The device was detonated at Lop Nur Test Base
Lop Nur
Lop Lake or Lop Nur is a group of small, now seasonal salt lake sand marshes between the Taklamakan and Kuruktag deserts in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, southeastern portion of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China.The lake system into which the Tarim...

, or often dubbed as Lop Nur Nuclear Weapon Test Base, in Malan
Malan
-People:*César Malan*David Malan*Lucio Malan , Italian politician*Solomon Caesar Malan*William Gerald Malan, Missouri bankerMembers of the prominent South African Malan family:*F. S...

, Xinjiang
Xinjiang
Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...

, on 17 June 1967. With successful testing of this three-stage thermonuclear device, China became the fourth country to have successfully developed a thermonuclear weapon after the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 and the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

. It was dropped from a Hong-6
Xian H-6
The Xian H-6 is a license-built version of the Soviet Tupolev Tu-16 twin-engine jet bomber, built for the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force....

 (Chinese manufactured Tu-16) and was parachute-retarded for an airburst at 2960 meters. The bomb was a three-stage device with a boosted U-235
Uranium-235
- References :* .* DOE Fundamentals handbook: Nuclear Physics and Reactor theory , .* A piece of U-235 the size of a grain of rice can produce energy equal to that contained in three tons of coal or fourteen barrels of oil. -External links:* * * one of the earliest articles on U-235 for the...

 primary and U-238
Uranium-238
Uranium-238 is the most common isotope of uranium found in nature. It is not fissile, but is a fertile material: it can capture a slow neutron and after two beta decays become fissile plutonium-239...

 pusher. The yield
Nuclear weapon yield
The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is the amount of energy discharged when a nuclear weapon is detonated, expressed usually in the equivalent mass of trinitrotoluene , either in kilotons or megatons , but sometimes also in terajoules...

 was 3.3 megatons
TNT equivalent
TNT equivalent is a method of quantifying the energy released in explosions. The ton of TNT is a unit of energy equal to 4.184 gigajoules, which is approximately the amount of energy released in the detonation of one ton of TNT...

.

It was a fully functional, full-scale, three-stage hydrogen bomb, tested 32 months after China had made its first fission device. China thus produced the shortest fission-to-fusion development known in history. China had received extensive technical help from the Soviet Union to jump-start their nuclear program, but by 1960, the rift between the Soviet Union and China had become so great that the Soviet Union ceased all assistance to China. Thus, the Number 6 test was indeed an independent endeavor, after the induced military and economic sanctions enacted by the superpowers at the time, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, a comparison of other fission-to-fusion timespans may be instructive. The time between the U.S.'s first atomic test and its first hydrogen bomb test was 86 months, for the USSR it was 75 months, for the UK 66 months and later for France, 105 months.

The goal of China was to produce a thermonuclear device of at least a megaton in yield that could be dropped by an aircraft or carried by a ballistic missile. Several explosions to test thermonuclear weapon designs, characteristics and yield boosting preceded the thermonuclear test.

See also

  • List of Chinese nuclear tests
  • List of states with nuclear weapons
  • Teller–Ulam design
  • 816 Nuclear Military Plant
    816 Nuclear Military Plant
    816 Nuclear Military Plant , is a Chinese underground nuclear base, and the largest in the world. The nuclear base is located in what is now suburban Chongqing, a municipality in Southwest China. It is a military megaproject.-Introduction:...

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