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

The discovery of the spy ring was a shock to the Western public, and Nunn May’s arrest was a shock to the atomic scientists in particular. The day after it was announced several people were discussing it at Los Alamos, including Fuchs, Egon Bretscher and his wife Hannah, and Else Placzek. She was the wife of the Czech-born scientist Ernest Placzek, but she had previously been married to a physicist working in the Montreal laboratory. She had known Nunn May in Montreal, so the others all asked her what he was like.

She found it difficult to ascribe any special characteristics to him. She said he was very quiet and one did not notice him much, and then she said, ‘He was just a nice, quiet bachelor, very helpful at parties. Just like Klaus here.’ Fuchs flushed and became visibly uncomfortable. The others assumed this was just because attention was drawn to him.

One of the people questioned in the follow-up to the Gouzenko disclosures was Israel Halperin, Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s University, Windsor, Ontario, and a member of the Canadian Communist Party. His papers were searched and Fuchs’s name was found. This was only because Halperin had been given Fuchs’s name by a friend of Kristel Heineman’s when Fuchs was in the internment camp in Canada, and he sent Fuchs some magazines while he was in the camp. The two had never met. None the less, this information was passed on to the British security authorities, along with many other minor details arising out of the investigations, but not until 1949. (Halperin was charged with espionage but acquitted.)

Nunn May’s trial in Britain and the reaction to it provide some insights into the political atmosphere of the time, as well as bearing on Fuchs’s own actions. The Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, prosecuted. Nunn May pleaded guilty to the offence, but his defence counsel, Gerald Gardiner, KC, made a strong speech in mitigation. He pointed out that the charge referred to communicating information ‘which was calculated to be or might be useful to an enemy’. But, he said, when the information was passed over, the Soviet Union was a valued ally; Soviet forces were advancing on Berlin, while British troops had not yet reached the Rhine.

At this point Sir Hartley Shawcross rose with an interjection. ‘My Lord, I think I ought to make it abundantly clear that there is no kind of suggestion that the Russians are enemies or potential enemies,’ he said. ‘The court has already decided that the offence consists in the communication of information to unauthorized persons — it might be to Your Lordship, it might be to me, it might be to anyone.’

Gardiner also referred to a statement that Winston Churchill had made in Parliament at one point during the war that Britain was giving Russia any technical information that could be of use in the war effort. Rightly or wrongly, he said, Nunn May felt indignant that this promise was not being kept.

Nunn May was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. A lot of people said the sentence was harsh in the circumstances. After all, he had given the information to the Russians, not to the other side. The Association of Scientific Workers asked for a reduction in the sentence. A delegation led by Harold Laski, the Chairman of the Labour Party and its principal political philosopher, called at the Home Office, also to ask for the sentence to be reduced.

There was another, lesser breach of security regulations in favour of an ally which has never been reported. At Los Alamos Edward Teller, pursuing work on a ‘super’, a hydrogen bomb, joined Egon Bretscher to make some calculations into deuterium — tritium reactions, which would be relevant to this. Bretscher decided that since he was there with the British group of scientists, Britain was entitled to have the results of this work, although he knew that it would be classified secret by the Los Alamos laboratory. Fuchs was going to return to England in early June, a little before the Bretschers, and he would travel by way of Washington. So Bretscher gave him a paper containing his calculations and asked him if he would take it to James Chadwick, who was still in Washington.

The day he was to go, Hannah Bretscher was out shopping and she noticed that security guards at the gate were searching every car that was leaving. The reason — although she did not appreciate this at the time — was that items of equipment had been disappearing from the laboratories. She reported this to her husband, and he suggested that she should warn Fuchs that he might be searched as he left. So she went over to Fuchs’s room in the big house and told him. Fuchs shrugged off his anxieties. ‘It’s quite all right. I’m used to carrying secret reports,’ he told her. The next moment he seemed flustered and, as if searching for something to say, he suddenly offered her a drink, although it was the early afternoon and not a normal drinking time.

Fuchs drove out of the gate without any trouble. He was accompanied by A. P. French, an American scientist who was remaining at Los Alamos; Fuchs had sold him his car on condition that he could drive it to Albuquerque Airport and hand it over there. He flew to Washington and met Chadwick, and then went to Cambridge for one more visit to the Heinemans. After this he was going to Schenectady to see Hans Bethe; he took his sister along to give her a break from the children and, since she said she had never flown before, they went by plane. (As always, he was meticulous, in submitting his expense accounts, in subtracting any extra cost involved in the side trips to Cambridge and Schenectady, since these were made for personal reasons.) Then he went on to the Montreal laboratory.

He was going to return to England by sea, but while he was with the Heinemans in Cambridge he received a cable from Cockcroft. The promised establishment was already set up, at Harwell, and it had been decided that Fuchs would be the head of the Theoretical Physics Division, one of seven division heads. Cockcroft asked him in his cable to attend a meeting of the Steering Committee on 1 July. So Fuchs flew back from Montreal in an RAF transport plane on 27 June.

He attended the Steering Committee meeting, but did not take up his post immediately. First he went to Germany where, as well as meeting some German scientists, he had a brief reunion with his father. They had not seen each other since the young Klaus Fuchs left Kiel for Berlin in that terrible spring of 1933.

Fuchs took up his post at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, on 1 August 1946, seven months after the Ministry of Supply formally took possession of the site. It was on the green, windswept Berkshire [11] County boundaries have been changed, and today Harwell is in Oxfordshire. downs, fifty-five miles from London and eighteen miles from Oxford. It had been an RAF airfield during the war, and glider squadrons took off from there to take part in the D-Day landings. It was, and is today, one and a half miles long and a mile wide, surrounded by a wire fence and heavily policed, although most of the residential and recreational area is outside the fence. Fuchs came with the civil service grade of principal scientific officer, at a salary of £950 a year, a comfortable salary in those days, particularly for a single man.

The years at Harwell completed the transformation of Fuchs from an outsider into a member of the society in which he lived. He was no longer alienated from his surroundings. Now he had friends and not just working colleagues, a homeland and not just a country of asylum, a career and not just a job. If he was lonely now, it was because of what he was doing rather than what he was. It was the loneliness of the spy, not of the outsider. His role as a secret informant of the Soviet Union was a left-over from his earlier life, and towards the end of his time at Harwell, he was starting to abandon it.