Project 596 (Miss Qiu, Chinese: 邱小姐; pinyin: Qiū Xiǎojiě, as the callsign; Chic-1 by the US intelligence agencies) was the first nuclear fission weapons test conducted by the People’s Republic of China, detonated on 16 October 1964, at the Lop Nur test site, yield 22 kilotons of TNT (92 TJ). It was a uranium-235 implosion fission device made from weapons-grade uranium (U-235) enriched in a gaseous diffusion plant in Lanzhou.
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. 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.
China established the Lop Nur Nuclear Test Base on 16 October 1959 with Soviet assistance in selection of the site, with its headquarters at Malan, about 125 km (78 mi) northwest of Qinggir. The first Chinese nuclear bomb test, codenamed '596', was tested at Lop Nur in 1964. The PRC detonated its first hydrogen bomb on June 17, 1967. Until 1996, 45 nuclear tests were conducted. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)The mushroom cloud from the testThe mushroom cloudChina's first hydrogen bomb testThe Chinese test site at Lop Nur as photographed on October 20, 1964 by a KH-4 satellite four days after the test. (Photo courtesy of Tim Brown, with Talent-Keyhole.com)The Lop Nur nuclear test site in northwestern China, photographed on December 8, 1966, during a KH-7/GAMBIT satellite reconnaissance mission. A test occurred on December 28, 1966.Zhou Enlai announcing the success of the test.
