Norman Moss - Klaus Fuchs - The Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb

Then Germany invaded, and even Kurchatov thought work on atomic fission would have to be shelved in favour of more urgent defence projects, and he went to work on protecting ships against magnetic mines. However, another physicist was able to work out that an atomic bomb programme was under way elsewhere, by a process that shows how difficult it is to switch from openness to secrecy. This was a younger colleague of Kurchatov called G. N. Flyorov, who was at that time a lieutenant in the Air Force. He was reading through the academic journals in his field, and he suddenly realized that after the flurry of excitement about nuclear fission in 1939 and 1940, no leading American or British physicist had published anything on the subject. Flyorov noticed the dog that did not bark. He concluded that work on atomic fission must now be secret. He wrote a letter to Stalin calling for an urgent programme to build a uranium bomb, and his letter was considered by the State Defence Committee.

Fuchs’s information confirmed Flyorov’s thesis. Soviet Intelligence also learned that German scientists were exploring the possibility of building a bomb, although this turned out to be only a very limited effort. Stalin himself was informed of all this.

The State Defence Committee put Mikhail Pervukhin, the Minister for the Chemical Industry, in charge of uranium research. Then in April 1942, as told at the beginning of this book, the Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, on Stalin’s personal instructions, gave Pervukhin a file containing foreign intelligence material, and told him to consult his scientists on what action to take. This file would have contained Fuchs’s first reports to Kremer. Presumably the scientists also saw reports he sent later in the year; they evidently recommended the commencement of a bomb programme. At the end of the year the State Defence Committee ordered the establishment of a laboratory to work on a uranium bomb, with Kurchatov in charge, and work began the following March.

This was a remarkable commitment considering what must have been the urgent demands on scientific and other resources at that time. David Holloway, the Soviet affairs specialist who has made a study of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, has written: ‘The key factor in the atomic decision of 1942 was Soviet knowledge of the German and American work on the bomb.’ [5] From ‘The Soviet Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb, 1939-45’, in Social Studies of Science , 1981.

The Maud Committee’s work had spurred on the United States to put an atomic bomb project into gear. Thanks to Fuchs, it had much the same effect in the Soviet Union. The detailed papers that Fuchs passed over were read by scientists working in the field in Russia. This is evident from the fact that questions were sent to his contacts in Britain, who in turn passed them on to Fuchs. Most of the questions at this stage were either random shots in the dark, or else they were misinterpreted in transmission, because they made no sense to Fuchs. But one did: he was asked whether he knew anything about using electromagnetism to separate uranium 235. He was surprised, and said he did not know anything about this, which was true. But the Tube Alloys group in Oxford had made a preliminary examination of the possibility of this, and at the Berkeley laboratory in California, Ernest Lawrence was developing a serious electromagnetic separation project.

In 1942 Fuchs applied again for British citizenship. This time he had the backing of the Tube Alloys directorate, which said that, although an enemy alien, he was doing work that was valuable for the war effort. An application for citizenship must have two sponsors. One of his was Professor Nevill Mott, who, unlike his other mentors and friends, was British-born. Fuchs became a British citizen and took an oath of allegiance to the Crown on 7 August 1942. At this time, he was regularly passing secret information to the Soviet intelligence service. In America, naturalization is a part of the national story, the great step of becoming an American which nearly every one of their forefathers has passed through. It does not have the same significance for most people in Britain, and clearly Fuchs did not see his oath of allegiance as a constraint on his actions.

Early in 1942, several leading Tube Alloys scientists visited the United States to see the work being done there, as part of the programme of Anglo-American co-operation. Peierls was among them. There were hazards in crossing the Atlantic in wartime, and Peierls left instructions on the continuation of his work if he should be killed. The British scientists found that although they were ahead of the Americans on the theoretical side, the Americans had made great progress in experimental work, and were already working on three different possible methods of uranium diffusion.

Fuchs was forming friendships. He was becoming fond of the Peierls, and they of him. When he had a short holiday he went up to Edinburgh and stayed with Max Born and his wife. He became ill for a few days with a dry cough that was to continue to trouble him for some years, and sat in the Peierls’ little garden, wrapped in a heavy woollen dressing-gown. The doctor who saw him took to him, and invited him home to dinner. Later, when the doctor was ill with leukaemia and Fuchs was in America, Fuchs sent him a food parcel.

The Peierls had their house on a five-year lease, which was to run out towards the end of 1942. They found a flat but there would be no room in it for a lodger. Mrs Peierls told Fuchs that he would have to find somewhere else to live. But he evidently found it hard to accept that he would have to leave the security of their home, and made no move to find another place even when the time for leaving the house drew closer. ‘Klaus, you’ll have to start looking for a place of your own,’ Mrs Peierls would tell him. ‘There won’t be any room for you in our flat. It only has four rooms.’ Only when they were about to move did he find a room in a boarding-house near their flat.

At the end of 1942 the Peierls gave a New Year’s Eve party. Mrs Peierls had a lot to drink, and as she often did on such occasions she began to sing Russian songs. She suddenly noticed Fuchs gazing at her with a look of extraordinary intensity, such as she had never seen on him before, with an expression of what could have been adoration. It occurred to her that their young friend might be falling in love with her, and she made a mental note to discourage any such attachment. But there were no more signs of this, and she forgot the thought, although the intensity of Fuchs’s gaze remained in her memory. Later, when Fuchs’s activities were revealed, she decided that this look of adoration was directed, not at her, but at the reminder of Russia in the songs she was singing, a land that was the repository of his hopes for the world.

A degree of admiration for Russia was widespread in Britain at this time, and in America also. America and Britain were at war with Germany, but they were not yet engaged on any major front in Europe. The Russians were doing nearly all the fighting, and they were doing what no other country had succeeded in doing so far — halting the German army’s advance and turning it back. The massive governmental aid to Russia was supplemented by private donations to Soviet war charities, sometimes raised in humble surroundings, sometimes at fund-raising banquets in the smartest American hotels. [6] I was at a boarding school in New York, and I remember well us all being taught in chapel to sing the rousing Cossack Song. — NM Max Born wrote in a letter to Fuchs, recalling their argument over the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939: ‘The news from Russia seems quite hopeful. You must be gratified that your belief in the Russians is so much justified now, even with respect to Finland.’