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1.
In 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced work on the hydrogen bomb was to continue. -
2.
On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated a 10.4-megaton hydrogen device in the Pacific on the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. After the detonation of Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the Teller–Ulam configuration. Teller became known in the press as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." -
3.
On August 12, 1953, the Soviet Union tested its first fusion-based device on a tower in central Siberia. The bomb had a yield of 400 kilotons. Though not nearly as powerful as the American bomb tested nine months earlier, it had one key advantage: It was a usable weapon, small enough to be dropped from an airplane. -
4.
Fourteen months later, on March 1, 1954, a deliverable hydrogen bomb using solid lithium deuteride was tested by the United States on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. -
6.
On November 22, 1955, the Soviet Union exploded its first true hydrogen bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site. It had a yield of 1.6 megatons. -
5.
An American crash programme under Teller was ready to drop the first H-bomb ever launched from an aircraft in May 1956. -
7.
October - Fire destroys the core of a reactor at Britain's Windscale nuclear complex, sending clouds of radioactivity into the atmosphere. -
8.
May 15 - First British H-bomb exploded at Christmas Island. The yield was between 200 - 300 kilotons. It was less than expected. -
9.
Britain's first truly successful thermonuclear bomb test. The bomb had a yield of 1.8 megatons. -
10.
This began a series of Soviet hydrogen bomb tests culminating on October 23, 1961, with an explosion of about 58 megatons. Khrushchev boasted, "It could have been bigger, but then it might have broken all the windows in Moscow, 4,000 miles away." -
11.
India tested a thermonuclear device during Pokran-II.
