The Atomic Spy... man who started the Cold War
“WHAT does one make of a man many considered a hero for fighting the Nazis and whom many others considered a traitor?”
That was the question posed by author Nancy Thorndike Greenspan when she tried to answer both in her book Atomic Spy.
Klaus Fuchs was born in 1911.
His father Emil instilled in his children a belief that they must pursue what is right and just, no matter what the consequences.
Moral
In another era, this rigid moral code might have made Klaus a revered figure.
THE man who would become known as the Atomic Spy is better remembered for his cold-blooded betrayal than for his science.
Klaus Fuchs, a brilliant German theoretical physicist, handed the Soviet Union secrets that allowed it to accelerate its Cold War work on a nuclear weapon.
But he was also once a trusted scientist who made crucial contributions to the infamous Manhattan Project.
It was his work on that which led to the development of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago, killing more than 100,000 people.
But in the chaos of Germany as the aftermath of the 1929 economic crash stoked a growing fascist movement, it led him to communism and its utopian promises of social equality.
As the Nazis rose to power, the Fuchs family’s resistance to fascism tore it apart.
His mother, Else, killed herself in 1931. One of his sisters did the same a few years later. Emil was briefly imprisoned, and his three surviving children fled Germany.
In 1933, facing arrest because of his political activities at university, Klaus found temporary safety in the United Kingdom.
Only 21, and already a promising physicist, he continued his studies in Bristol, publishing a key paper on the conductivity of thin metallic films.
In 1937, he moved on to the University of Edinburgh to work for a fellow refugee, the quantum- mechanics pioneer and later Nobel prize-winner Max Born.
When the UK entered the Second World War, it declared Germans enemy aliens. Born, by then a British citizen, was exempt.
But in May 1940, Fuchs was sent to an internment camp, where German communists, Jews and Nazi prisoners of war were crammed together.
He was to be bounced between facilities, eventually ending up in Quebec, Canada.
Among the most horrific passages in Greenspan’s book are the descriptions of the UK government’s bungling and inhumane treatment of detainees.
Greenspan details a harrowing sea journey, on which prisoners were forced to clean up human poo with their bare hands.
The awful experience hardened Fuchs’s views, and in the camps he came into contact with a prominent communist, who may have helped recruit him to spy for the Soviet Union.
Technical
Released in late 1940, Fuchs returned to the UK, where he worked in Birmingham with Rudolf Peierls, another German-born physicist.
Peierls was involved in a secret project to build an atomic bomb, and Fuchs started providing technical information about it to the Soviets, handing over documents in secret meetings.
In 1943, he was sent across the Pond to work on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. atomic bomb programme.
The demand for scientific talent was high, and authorities did not dig too deeply into Fuchs’s past.
In New York, and later in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he had a secret rendezvous with a Soviet agent.
To him he handed detailed information, including the design for “the Gadget”, a plutonium bomb.
A similar bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.
After the war ended, Fuchs returned to work at the British nuclear research institute at Harwell, then Berkshire but now in Oxfordshire.
Uranium
There, he headed the theoretical-physics division, working on gaseous diffusion to enrich uranium, a subject he had studied during the Manhattan Project.
His espionage continued until 1949, the year that the Soviets conducted
their first test nuclear explosion.
But by then, the intelligence services were closing in.
Intercepted messages had alerted the United States and the United Kingdom to an atomic spy in their ranks.
Soon, Fuchs emerged as a top suspect.
In 1950, stricken with guilt over betraying his friends, and enticed by a secret-service official’s lie that admitting guilt would allow him to stay at Harwell, he confessed.
He was sentenced to 14 years in prison and stripped of his British citizenship. Released after nine years, he joined his father in East Germany.
Ashes
Fuchs died in Berlin in January, 1988, aged 76. He was cremated and his ashes buried in the the Socialists’ Memorial in Berlin’s famous Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.
So what, then, to make of Fuchs?
It was always clear that he was driven by ideology, not greed.
And he genuinely believed that helping the Soviet Union to get the bomb would make the world safer.
But proliferation as prevention is a view that ia hard to fathom these days.
Yet even those who might disagree with Greenspan’s charitable portrayal will find much to appreciate about a narrative that captures the heated politics of that era with lessons for our own.
With regard to Fuchs’s moral legacy, it is not unreasonable to note that Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who helped the U.S. in the space race, is regarded by many as a hero despite his earlier work for the Nazis.
Conviction
Yet Fuchs, who risked his life to battle Nazis, is remembered mostly for his later betrayal.
Is it better to serve all masters faithfully, as von Braun did, regardless of their righteousness?
And so we are left wondering how things might have turned out had the UK government had decided not to send Fuchs to a detention camp purely for being born German.
When Harwell’s head of security visited Fuchs’s house after his conviction, he found under the bed the uniform the scientist was forced to wear at that camp more than a decade earlier.
In the end, though, the most persuasive defence of Fuchs came from his father.
Like “the mass of our bourgeoisie”, his father Emil said, the family could have “said ‘Heil Hitler’ and thus spared themselves everything.”
He added: “Then maybe my children, like so many, would have died for Hitler instead of their own convictions.” he added.