On June 17, 1967, just three years after its first nuclear test, China detonated its first hydrogen bomb.
The beginning of Beijing's nuclear ambitions was set on October 16, 1964, when the People's Republic of China conducted its first nuclear test, becoming the fifth country with nuclear weapons after the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and France.
China launched its nuclear weapons program in the mid-1950s, after the Korean War. His efforts were initially supported by significant Soviet aid, including advisors and technical equipment.
Research into nuclear weapons design began at the Institute of Physics and Atomic Energy in Beijing, and a uranium enrichment plant was built in Lanzhou to produce weapons-grade uranium.
As Sino-Soviet relations cooled in the late 1950s, the Soviet Union withdrew all aid. In June 1959, Nikita Khrushchev decided to withhold a prototype bomb from the Chinese. This rift prompted China to begin its own nuclear testing project, codenamed 59-6 after the month in which it was launched.
Operation 59-6 was conducted at the Lop Nur test site in the Gobi Desert in Xinjiang Province, western China, near the ancient Silk Road. Atop a steel tower is an implosion-type device that produces a yield of 22 kilotons. This is the first of 45 Chinese nuclear tests, all of which have been conducted at Lop Nur. Twenty-three of these tests were atmospheric and 22 were underground, ranging in yield from 1 kiloton to 4 megatons.
China conducted its last test on July 29, 1996, just two months before the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) on September 24, 1996. However, Beijing has yet to ratify the CTBT, a step that is required for the treaty to enter into force. Ratifications are also lacking from seven other nuclear-capable states: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Egypt, India, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, and the United States.
The impact of China's nuclear testing on human, animal, and environmental health has largely gone unstudied due to a lack of publicly available official data. Xinjiang is China's largest administrative division and is home to 20 million people of various ethnicities. A study by Japanese physicist Professor Yun Takada found that peak levels of radioactivity from China's high-power tests exceeded those from the 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident and seriously affected the local population.
In 2008, China began paying subsidies to personnel involved in nuclear testing. However, compensation has not been provided to civilians in the Xinjiang region, which is downwind of the Lop Nur test site.