Project 596

Project 596
Project 596
	The mushroom cloud from the test
Information
Country	People's Republic of China
Test site	Lop Nur Test Base
Period	16 October 1964
Number of tests	1
Test type	Atmospheric
Device type	Fission
Max. yield	22 kilotons of TNT (92 TJ)
Test chronology
	← None Test No. 6 →

Project 596 (Miss Qiu (Chinese: 邱小姐, Qiū Xiǎojiě) as the callsign,^[1] Chic-1 by the US intelligence agencies^[2]) was the first nuclear weapons test conducted by the People's Republic of China, detonated on 16 October 1964, at the Lop Nur test site. It was a uranium-235 implosion fission device made from weapons-grade uranium (U-235) enriched in a gaseous diffusion plant in Lanzhou.^[3]

The atomic bomb was a part of China's "Two Bombs, One Satellite" program. It had a yield of 22 kilotons, comparable to the Soviet Union's first nuclear bomb RDS-1 in 1949 and the American Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945.^[4] With the test, China became the fifth nuclear power in the world and the first Asian nation to possess nuclear capability. This was the first of 45 successful nuclear tests China conducted between 1964 and 1996, all of which occurred at the Lop Nur test site.^[5]

^ Fravel, Taylor (23 April 2019). Active Defense: China's Military Strategy Since 1949. Princeton University Press. p. 254. ISBN 9780691152134.
^ Cite error: The named reference cia1971 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ "16 October 1964 – First Chinese nuclear test: CTBTO Preparatory Commission". www.ctbto.org. Retrieved 2017-06-01.
^ Bukharin, Oleg; Podvig, Pavel Leonardovich; Hippel, Frank Von (2004). Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. MIT Press. p. 441. ISBN 9780262661812.
^ NORRIS, ROBERT S. (1996-03-01). "French and Chinese Nuclear Weapon Testing". Security Dialogue. 27 (1): 39–54. doi:10.1177/0967010696027001006. ISSN 0967-0106.