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

While everyone at Los Alamos worked on preparations for the secret tests, Fuchs was making his own preparations, for his next meeting with Gold, working alone in his room. He was going to give Soviet scientists all the help he could. He wrote a full account of the construction of both bombs. Doing this at Los Alamos was much easier than writing the details from memory in his sister’s house in Cambridge, for he had papers to refer to and he could give precise figures. Besides, the design for the bomb was just about completed now, and much of what was only speculative before was certain now. He reported that the bomb would have a solid plutonium core, and also a small initiator made of polonium as a neutron source. He gave full details of the tamper, the casing that held the bomb together for a few microseconds while the chain reaction started, and even the names of the two explosives that were to be used in the implosion, although he admitted that these names meant nothing to him. He explained a method of calculating the efficiency of the bomb devised by Bethe and Feynman, and also the figure for the efficiency that they had arrived at. Finally, as an aid to the explanations, he drew a diagram of the bomb, giving the most important dimensions.

Harry Gold had difficulty getting time off from his job to make the trip west in June, but he negotiated it as part of his summer vacation. He went by train to Albuquerque and took a bus to Santa Fe. His appointment with Fuchs was at four o’clock but he arrived in the city early, and spent an hour looking round a historical museum. There, he got a street map, the same as the one that Fuchs had given him in Cambridge back in February, located Alameda Street and walked along it under the trees to the Castillo Street Bridge, which was the meeting place. Fuchs drove up at four o’clock precisely, and Gold got in the car. Fuchs drove across the river and parked in a cul-de-sac, and they talked for a while in the car.

Fuchs told him he had some papers for him, but he also told him some things that were not in the papers. He said an atomic bomb would be tested soon out in the desert, and that it would be the equivalent to 10,000 tons of TNT. He said everyone was now working flat out at Los Alamos. Gold made notes of this later, and passed the information on.

Gold had a question for Fuchs, the request from the Soviet scientists for details of the implosion lens. Fuchs shrugged off the question, and said it was answered in the papers he was giving him. He was rarely forthcoming in answering questions that were put to him in this way. They arranged another meeting. Fuchs suggested one in August. Gold said he could not get away in August, so they settled on 19 September, at six in the evening, at a different spot. As always, Fuchs gave him the envelope containing his report at the last moment, and drove off.

Gold took the bus back to Albuquerque, and spent Saturday night there. On the Sunday morning, according to a confession he made five years later, he carried out his next assignment for Yakovlev. He went to an apartment house and rang the bell of an apartment that was rented by Sergeant David Greenglass, a member of a detachment of Army Engineers stationed at Los Alamos to give technical assistance on the scientific work. Greenglass’s wife Ruth lived in the apartment, and he stayed there on weekends.

Greenglass came to the door, and Gold said: ‘I come from Julius.’ Then he handed him a part of the cardboard top of a processed dessert package. Greenglass went into the other room and came back with another part of a package top. The two fitted together exactly. Greenglass asked Gold to come back in the afternoon, when he would have some material ready for him. When Gold returned, Greenglass gave him an envelope which contained whatever information he had been able to garner about the work that was going on at Los Alamos, and also a sketch of an implosion lens. He had been machining parts of the lens in a metal workshop. Unlike Fuchs’s diagram of the bomb, this sketch was rough and contained no figures, and no clear account of the working of the lens. In exchange, Gold gave Greenglass an envelope containing $500.

Gold’s account of that meeting in Albuquerque, the matching of the boxtops and the phrase ‘I come from Julius’, were to be repeated and discussed and examined for authenticity all around the world. ‘Julius’ was Green-glass’s brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, who was married to Ruth’s sister Ethel. He owned a small machine workshop in New York and belonged to several pro-Communist organizations. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put on trial for espionage, Gold’s story of the meeting was confirmed by Greenglass. It was the kernel of the prosecution’s case, and of the claim that the Rosenbergs were at the centre of a plot to pass atomic bomb secrets to Russia.

Fuchs had another one of his dry coughs shortly after seeing Gold in Santa Fe. Again he lay in bed for several days looking miserable, and again Mrs Peierls brought him soup.

The Trinity test took place on 17 July, shortly before dawn. Fuchs observed the test with a group of scientists twenty miles away, all of them watching through dark glasses. All those who saw it had been preparing for it for years, yet they were all astounded when it happened. The bright light, brighter than the noonday sun, which lit up the whole landscape where there had been darkness before, the giant pillar of smoke and dust billowing up and out into the now familiar mushroom-shaped cloud that seemed to dwarf the plain and the mountains around, the evidence of the almost incredible power of the explosion, all made an impact on their emotions for which their intellectual concept of the atomic bomb had not prepared them.

Something new had arrived on this planet, and they had brought it into being. Many of them were struck with new force by their own responsibility for this. Fuchs also was impressed by the test, as he told Gold later, and he must have felt a double sense of responsibility. He, too, had helped bring this new kind of weapon into being, but he was also helping to give it to another nation.

News of the successful Trinity test was sent to President Truman in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, where he was beginning a conference with the British and Soviet leaders on postwar plans for Germany and on concluding the war against Japan.

Truman recorded in his memoirs what he told Stalin, and Stalin’s reaction, and this passage has been quoted often. Truman approached Stalin after a formal session of the conference, a week after the news of the Trinity test, and, he says, ‘casually mentioned to him that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force’. Stalin said he was glad to hear it, and hoped that America would make good use of the bomb against Japan. Truman believed that Stalin had no idea what he was referring to, or of the importance of the new weapon, and Churchill, who heard the exchange, also had this impression. [9] Harry S. Truman, 1945: Year of Decisions . They did not know about the secret information that Soviet Intelligence was getting, and which evidently was passed on up to Stalin himself.

But there is another account of Stalin’s reaction to Truman’s remark that is less well known. This comes in the memoirs of a Russian participant in the Potsdam conference, Marshal Georgi Zhukov. He was present when Stalin told Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov what Truman had said, and he recalled:

‘They’re raising the price,’ said Molotov.

Stalin laughed. ‘Let them. We’ll have a talk with Kurchatov today about speeding up our work,’ he said.

I realized that they were talking about the creation of an atomic bomb. [10] G. K. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections . This passage is quoted and translated by David Holloway in The Soviet Union and the Arms Race .