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

Now Gold showed ingenuity. The bookstall at Grand Central Station was open on Sunday mornings, so he went there and bought a recently published novel by Thomas Mann. Then he wrote in the inside cover: ‘K. Fuchs, 128 West 77th Street, New York, NY’. He went to the brownstone house at that address and rang Fuchs’s bell. He got no answer, so he went to the janitor. He told him he was a friend of Fuchs, and had come to return this book that Fuchs had loaned him. The janitor told him only that Fuchs no longer lived there, and said he had gone away ‘somewhere on a boat’. Gold went to report back to Yakovlev.

The Russian was waiting for him on upper Broadway, standing on a street corner among the people coming out to buy their huge Sunday newspapers or some fresh bagels or platzels for a Sunday brunch. The two men walked down to Riverside Drive and strolled along in the sunshine discussing what they could do next. The only thing now seemed to be to wait to hear from Fuchs and, if they did not hear from him, to leave a message with his sister in Cambridge. Yakovlev told Gold, in a colloquial English he had evidently acquired, ‘Sit tight’.

Gold went back to Philadelphia. The next month, September, he took a bus to Boston one Sunday, arriving there in the evening. He went to the Heinemans’ house and knocked on the door. A woman answered and said the Heinemans were away on vacation and would not be back until sometime in October.

He went back to Yakovlev, and they agreed that he should make another trip later. Yakovlev suggested that he go on a weekday, when Robert Heineman was not likely to be at home. Yakovlev also gave him a message, which Gold typed out. This told Fuchs to telephone a certain number any day between 8.00 and 8.30, and say simply, ‘I have arrived in Cambridge and will be here for — days.’ He put this in an envelope and sealed it. He went up to Cambridge on a weekday in early November and knocked on the door, and this time Mrs Heineman answered.

Gold said he was a good friend of Fuchs from New York, and had lost touch with him; he happened to be in the Boston area on business and thought he would stop by and inquire after him. He said Fuchs had given him her address. Mrs Heineman told him that she expected him there at Christmas. Gold gave her the envelope for Fuchs. She said he had been transferred to another place; she did not know where it was, except that it was somewhere in the south-western United States.

One morning in November 1942, when Peierls and Fuchs were working in Birmingham on the Tube Alloys programme, two American physicists, Robert Oppenheimer and Edwin McMillan, rode on horseback into the Jemez Mountains, in the northern part of New Mexico. They were riding through some of the most magnificent scenery in the North American continent, but at this time of year it was cold at higher altitudes, and light snow flurries accompanied them some of the way, the snowflakes making the horses’ hooves slip as they melted underfoot, and adding a wet glisten to their flanks. However, Oppenheimer and McMillan were not riding for recreation; they were exploring.

They were both engaged in theoretical physics work on the atomic bomb project at the University of California’s campus at Berkeley. Their ride into the mountains followed a decision that a new laboratory should be created at which work on the atomic bomb would be carried through. It was decided that this laboratory should not be built at one of the places where work on the bomb was going on already — Columbia, the University of Chicago and Berkeley — but at an entirely new location. The site should be remote, in order that the work could be secret and secure, but there should be at least one good road leading to it so that equipment could be brought up. Oppenheimer owned a ranch in this part of New Mexico along with his brother Frank, and he thought that a place meeting all these requirements might be found there.

On this particular morning, they were going to look at a canyon that he and Major-General Leslie Groves, who was in overall command of the atomic bomb project, had picked out on a map. They rode down into it but decided that there was not enough space, and the canyon walls would be too confining. When Groves arrived in his staff car to meet them in the afternoon, Oppenheimer told him this. However, he said, he knew another site nearby which might be suitable: a place called Los Alamos, where there was now a boys’ school. They tethered their mounts and drove there with Groves in his car, and this time they liked what they saw. They talked to the school principal, who was also the owner. It turned out that the school did not have enough pupils and had fallen on hard times, and he would be only too happy to sell the land to the Government. Groves sent a telegram to Washington, and negotiations for the purchase of Los Alamos began immediately.

The laboratory that was established there in the spring of 1943, a place where Fuchs was to spend nearly two years, was the most extraordinary scientific centre there has ever been. More eminent scientists went to work there than have ever gathered in any other place for a prolonged period of time, taking leave of the academic world to vanish behind a wire fence. They were highly motivated, and worked with a dedication and a spirit of comradeship that made the years there, for most of them, one of the peak experiences of their lives. The atmosphere was very democratic. For the younger men, just out of university, one of the things that made the place exciting was that they were working and living alongside some of the giants in their field, whose discoveries they had only recently been learning about.

The entire laboratory and living area was a military base, and everyone there lived under military jurisdiction, in homes built by the army. They had to get permission from the army to be away overnight, and all incoming and outgoing mail was censored. Since the existence of the laboratory was a secret, they could give their address only as Box 1663, Santa Fe. They had no legal residence, and therefore could not vote. Even the Los Alamos troop of the Boy Scouts of America was anonymous; it was not allowed to send to the Boy Scouts’ national headquarters the names of scouts who had won badges, as is customary, because their names might reveal the presence of their scientist fathers.

The community was an isolated one: by geography, for there was no town closer than Santa Fe, thirty miles away; by the strict secrecy that surrounded the work; and also by the esoteric nature of the work, which bound together the people doing it. For the scientists, being at Los Alamos meant working harder than most of them had ever worked before, wrestling with the many problems of using nuclear physics to create an explosive device: a fourteen-hour day was not uncommon, and a six-day working week was the established norm. It meant spending much of what leisure time they had in the company of the same people with whom they spent their working hours, and most of these people becoming friends, special friends. For the wives, it meant exchanging advice on acquiring food from the army’s stores and cooking on their wood-burning stoves. It also meant occasionally arguing with military and civilian clerks over the allocation of facilities, and when the army started bussing in Indian women from the surrounding area to serve as cleaners and part-time maids, for an allocation of some of their time. For everyone it meant parties at which they would dance to records and play party games, including a form of charades that became a favourite, called Indications. It meant trips out into the vastness of the countryside in an effort to put the pressure of the work behind them for a day or so with outdoor pursuits: hiking, riding, swimming in a nearby reservoir, skiing.