🚨Communist China Explodes First Atom Bomb

Oct. 16, 1964 - Communist China announced today that it had exploded its first atom bomb. Peking pledged that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in the future.

A communiqué stated that a nuclear test was successfully conducted at 3 p.m. Peking time (3 a.m., Eastern daylight time) in the western region of China. No details were disclosed. In Washington, the test site was reported to be in Sinkiang, a province bordering the Soviet Union.

“The success of China’s nuclear test is a major achievement of the Chinese people in the strengthening of their national defense and the safeguarding of their motherland as well as a major contribution by the Chinese people to the cause of the defense of world peace,” the communiqué asserted.

An accompanying Government statement declared that the purpose of developing nuclear weapons was to protect the Chinese people “from the danger of the United States’ launching a nuclear war.”

“On the question of nuclear weapons, China will commit neither the error of adventurism nor the error of capitulation,” the statement said. “The Chinese people can be trusted.”

President Johnson said today that Communist China’s first nuclear test was more a “tragedy for the Chinese people” because of their poverty than a threat to world peace.

While the test reflects policies that do not serve “the cause of peace,” the President said, “there is no reason to fear that it will lead to immediate dangers of war.”

The President gave his views at the White House in confirming that Peking had exploded what he described as a crude nuclear device.

The explosion was above ground and thus was the first test in the atmosphere since the signing last year of the treaty forbidding all but underground nuclear tests. Communist China did not sign the treaty.

U.S. detection experts estimated today’s explosion had had a yield of 10 to 20 kilotons — the equivalent of 10,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT.

This was a little less than had been expected by U.S. experts, some of whom had feared that Communist China would try for a larger nuclear explosion or perhaps set off a thermonuclear device on its first test.

The test was believed to have had a slightly smaller yield than the first atomic explosion by the United States in July 1945 and the first two atomic bombs dropped on Japan — all of which were around 20 kilotons.

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