On October 27, 1966, China carried out its first test in which a missile carried a nuclear warhead over a distance and detonated at the target, and the experiment was reported as a success. The missile was launched from a site in the north west and flew to a target area in the desert, and the warhead exploded at the planned point after the flight, which combined the two parts of a nuclear delivery system in one test. It followed the first Chinese atomic explosion in October 1964 and preceded the first hydrogen bomb test of June 1967. The test worked.
The work had been carried out under a programme that began in the 1950s, and it involved research institutes, the army and a large industrial effort in the interior, and it was pressed forward after the withdrawal of Soviet advisers in 1960. The test required the warhead to survive the flight and the heat of re-entry and to detonate at the right moment, and the engineering was done with the equipment that was available. The work was hard. The programme was expensive for a poor country.
The Chinese government stated at the time that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons and that it sought the complete prohibition and destruction of such weapons, and it repeated that position after the test. The country joined the test ban negotiations only much later and signed the comprehensive test ban treaty in 1996, and it has kept to a moratorium on testing since then. The announcement of the test was made through the official news agency.
The test is studied as the point at which China acquired what is called a nuclear deterrent, that is, a weapon that can be delivered against a distant target. The step was large. Further tests in the following years improved the missiles and the warheads, and the programme also produced the rockets that were used later for satellites, and the launch sites in the north west became part of the space programme.