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

At Los Alamos, now that the bomb was a reality and its destructive power had impressed itself forcibly on its creators, scientists began to discuss with new urgency what should be done with it.

Some said they should emulate their colleagues at the Chicago laboratory, and draw up a petition urging that the bomb should be demonstrated to the Japanese and not dropped on an inhabited place without warning. This was suggested to Oppenheimer, who discouraged the idea. Fuchs took no part in these discussions. In any case, events were moving more rapidly than the scientists at Los Alamos knew. Even while the count-down for the Trinity test of a plutonium bomb was going on, the components of the first uranium 235 bomb were on their way by train to San Francisco; there they were loaded aboard the cruiser USS Indianapolis, and taken to Tinian Island, in the central Pacific. B-29 bombers of a specially assembled Air Force bomber group had been practising for the mission on Tinian. On 6 August, three weeks and one day after the Trinity test, a uranium 235 bomb was exploded for the first time, blasting and burning and irradiating the city of Hiroshima and most of its inhabitants. Three days later, a plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

The fact of the new weapon and its use were announced in Washington, along with an outline story of the whole project. The people of Santa Fe learned at last what had been going on at that mysterious place up on the mesa. The news was greeted with cheers at Los Alamos, and some celebratory parties. There was a banging of garbage can lids and at one stage a conga line snaked along one of the unpaved Los Alamos avenues. Some people went into Santa Fe to have a party at a restaurant there. At a few of the parties, the revelry dwindled away after a while to sober discussion.

A celebration of such an event may seem callous from the perspective of the peacetime world and, furthermore, a world which is still living in the shadow of the nuclear bomb, but it was natural at that time and place. In time of war attention is concentrated on the short-term objective of winning, and rarely on the historical perspective. The war had been going on for years and lists of American dead were growing. The invasion of Japan was the next step, and this would take a terrible toll. Japan was being bombed every day, and its main cities were being burned up. Now this one air raid looked like bringing the war to an end, and it was the result of years of intense work that these people had devoted to the task. It was their triumph.

With the end of the war, the scientists at Los Alamos, like millions of other people, started thinking about returning to their peacetime careers. Most of the seventeen British scientists were due to leave soon, so the British mission decided that they would give a farewell party for their American hosts. They planned it carefully: the wives would cook soup and turkeys for 150 people in their separate kitchens, and then rush them over to Fuller’s Lodge as soon as the communal meal was over and the dining-hall vacated. For dessert they would make trifle, a dish unknown to Americans, mixing it in vats.

The high point of the evening would be the entertainment: a British pantomime, Babes in the Wood, with the scientists as the babes and a security officer portrayed as the wicked witch. Among the other pleasures was to be Otto Frisch’s performance as an Indian maiden. Fuchs was not persuaded to play a part in the pantomime, but he volunteered to drive into Santa Fe to buy the drink for the party. He went just a few days before it was due to take place, on Tuesday, 19 September.

This time, he did not prepare papers for his Soviet recipients beforehand. Perhaps he was being more cautious, and did not want to risk anyone finding incriminating papers on him. He set out along the winding, empty road to Santa Fe, past scrublands and vistas of mesas and canyons, then pulled over to the side and wrote out his report for the Russians, sitting in his car.

He had worked out the present rate of production of uranium 235 and plutonium at the production plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford and he gave these figures — 100 kilograms a month and twenty kilograms a month respectively. This would give an idea of how many atomic bombs America could make. Since Germany and Japan were no longer the enemies, it seemed pertinent to tell the Russians this. He wrote down a few more details of the design of the two atomic bombs. He said a suggestion for a ‘mixed’ bomb using uranium 235 and plutonium was being considered.

Gold had flown out to Albuquerque by way of Chicago, and arrived at the rendezvous point at Bishop’s Lodge Road, on the outskirts of Santa Fe, at six o’clock. Fuchs, meanwhile, bought the drink and arrived twenty minutes late, apologizing. Gold got into the car, pushing the bottles aside, and they drove up into the hills just outside Santa Fe. As darkness came and they looked down on the twinkling lights appearing among the sand-coloured adobe buildings, Fuchs talked to Gold more fully than he had ever talked to him before.

Now Gold and everyone else knew about atomic bombs. Fuchs told Gold that he was awestruck by what had happened, and he was upset at the destruction that the bombs had caused. He said there was no longer a complete interchange of information between the Americans and British at Los Alamos. He told him that he was becoming anxious that the British authorities might locate his father and bring him to England. He was worried about his father’s health, but he was worried also that his father might inadvertently give away his Communist past.

He also said he expected to return to England either at the end of the year or early the following year. He said his sister Kristel would know when he returned, and Gold could find out from her. This time, he had worked out himself a method of contacting a Soviet intelligence agent in England, and he gave Gold the instructions. The rendezvous place would be a London underground station, Mornington Crescent. His contact should wait for him there on the first Sunday of each month, at eight o’clock in the evening. He should carry a bundle of books; Fuchs himself would carry a copy of Life magazine.

Eventually, Fuchs gave Gold the envelope with his report, and dropped him off near the centre of town, where he could get a bus. Then he drove back to Los Alamos with the wine and spirits for the party, to find that his friends were worried about him because he had been away so long. He and Harry Gold never met again. He still did not know Gold’s name.

Feynman suggested to Fuchs that instead of going back to England, where living conditions were difficult in the aftermath of the war, he might try to get an academic post in America. He should have no difficulty after his work in Los Alamos, he thought. But Fuchs turned down the idea. ‘Britain has been good to me. I feel I owe it to Britain to work there,’ he told him.

As he had betrayed Britain’s secrets and planned to go on doing so, one might see duplicity in his reply, but it is more likely that he was sincere and that any irony was unconscious. He really did appreciate the way he was accepted in Britain, and he was coming to feel that he belonged with British people. His activities on the part of the Soviet Union were locked away in that other compartment of his mind, where feelings of gratitude had no place. Certainly he seems to have given no thought to doing what he was instructed by the Communist Party to do when he crossed the German border into France in 1933, and return to post-Nazi Germany to contribute his skills to the rebuilding of the country, not even to the Communist Germany that was being created in the Soviet occupation zone.

The British party for the Americans was a great success. After this most of the British returned home, but Fuchs was invited to stay a few months longer, and he accepted. Genia Peierls and Mici Teller decided that before the Peierls left they would all have a two-week holiday in Mexico City, along with Fuchs. Fuchs agreed readily, and offered his car for the trip, but Teller begged off, saying that he had too much work to do. Mici said she would come anyway. Fuchs was due to visit the Montreal laboratory so they decided to start their holiday when he returned. They arranged to meet him at Albuquerque Airport, and begin the journey from there.