Washington upset the balance of atomic power by detonating the first hydrogen bomb in 1952, the UK’s security mandarins thought, and as soon as the Russians caught up, they feared Britain, rather than the US, would be left to bear the brunt of the weapon.
Newly opened cold war archives reveal the astonishment — and panic — within Whitehall at news of the power of the US H-bomb test at Enewetak in the Marshall Islands.
The explosion was 14 megatons in size, making it 1,000 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb, which brought the second world war to an end in 1945.
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