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

‘I can’t,’ said Fuchs.

‘Why not?’ asked Skardon.

‘Because you’re not security cleared,’ said Fuchs. Skardon was jolted once again. Fuchs was still being a stickler for the rules.

Skardon asked Fuchs who he would be willing to tell, and they settled on Michael Perrin. Fuchs said he wanted a rest over the weekend to get his thoughts clear. But he added that he was anxious about his future and wanted to get this matter cleared up as quickly as possible.

MI5 could have called in the police to arrest him at this point, but as a free man he was co-operating fully, and there was no knowing what the shock of arrest might do to him. He still had no inkling of the position he was in.

Besides, in making an arrest of this importance, the Government would have to be brought into the picture.

So Fuchs left the War Office and went back to Harwell, where no one knew anything about his confession. It was arranged before he left that he would come back the following Monday and tell Perrin what it was that he had told the Russians.

He came up the following Monday by train, and again Skardon met him at Paddington Station and drove him to the War Office. This time Perrin was there, with his pen and pad of notepaper, ready to take everything down in longhand.

There was so much to go over that they decided to divide it into four periods. These were headed: 1942 to December 1943; New York, from December 1943 to August 1944; Los Alamos, from August 1944 to the summer of 1946; and Harwell, the summer of 1946 to the spring of 1949.

Fuchs talked and Perrin wrote, prompting him with questions as they went along. Fuchs would search his memory for the answers. Skardon interjected an occasional friendly remark, but said little else.

They began at 10.30 in the morning. They broke off for lunch and went to a pub on the opposite side of Whitehall, and had beer and sandwiches sitting at a counter, among the lunchtime crowd. Most of the episodes in Fuchs’s long journey to surrender and confession took place in mundane settings. They talked small talk. Perrin found it difficult to join in because his head was swimming with what he had been taking down all morning. He had read Fuchs’s confession to Skardon and thought he knew the worst, but he was appalled at the amount of detailed information Fuchs had given the Russians.

They went back to the War Office and continued. Fuchs agreed with Perrin’s suggestion that the most important information he gave the Russians came from Los Alamos. When he was talking about his meetings with Raymond in Santa Fe, he said at one point: ‘They asked me what I knew about the tritium bomb, the super. I was very surprised because I hadn’t told them anything about it.’

Perrin said: ‘Let me get this clear. They asked you what you knew?’

Fuchs: ‘Yes… I hadn’t told them anything about it. I was surprised.’

‘Did you tell them anything?’

‘I gave them some simple information. I couldn’t explain it to Raymond because he wouldn’t understand a thing. All I could give them was something on paper.’

They finished at four o’clock and, so far as Fuchs was concerned, that was that. He went back to Harwell and left Perrin to stay and write up his notes, as a third-person summary of what Fuchs had said. It began: ‘First period. From 1942 to December 1943. Fuchs told me that his first contact was in early 1942. By this time, he had joined Professor Peierls’s team at Birmingham University…’

Later, Fuchs would add more details, but this made it clear to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the atomic bomb project that what he had done was of enormous importance. For instance, concerning his second report to Raymond in Santa Fe: ‘This second report fully described the plutonium bomb which had, by this time, been designed and was to be tested at “Trinity”. He provided a sketch of the bomb and its components and gave all the important dimensions. He reported that the bomb would have a solid plutonium core, and described the initiator, which, he said, would contain about fifty curies of plutonium…’

At the end of his summary of what Fuchs had said, Perrin added a paragraph: ‘I formed the impression that throughout the interview, Fuchs was genuinely trying to remember and report all the information that he had given to the Russian agents with whom he had been in contact, and that he was not withholding anything. He seemed, on the contrary, to be trying his best to help me to evaluate the present position of atomic energy work in Russia in the light of the information that he had, and had not, passed on to them.’

By now Attlee, and the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had been informed of Fuchs’s confession. Shawcross asked for a full account of what Fuchs had done, so Perrin sent him his report. It reached him in Liverpool, where he was on the political campaign trail, for a General Election was now in progress. Perrin did not keep a copy.

Meanwhile, world events thrust nuclear weapons, which had never been far from the thoughts and fears of the world’s public since the Cold War began, into the forefront again. After the revelation the previous September that Russia possessed the atomic bomb, a small number of people in America, with Edward Teller prominent among them, began to press in secret for a programme to move on to a yet higher level of destructiveness, and try to develop for the United States a hydrogen bomb. This was the ‘super’ that had been discussed at Los Alamos during Fuchs’s last months there. The concept was still unknown to most people. A secret debate took place over three months among a small number of people who did know of the possibility — it was no more than that; the pro-super group won. On 31 January President Truman announced that he had directed the Atomic Energy Commission to work towards the development of a hydrogen bomb.

Otto Frisch, who had started the British bomb project along with Peierls and had followed it through at Los Alamos, was now a Professor of Physics at Cambridge University and no longer had anything to do with weapons. He had given a number of radio talks on the BBC explaining atomic physics for the layman. After Truman’s announcement, the BBC telephoned Frisch and asked him whether he could give a talk explaining the principles of the hydrogen bomb, to be broadcast later that week. Frisch agreed. Then it occurred to him that he ought to have someone check the script in case he unwittingly committed a breach of security. He telephoned Fuchs at Harwell and asked him whether he would go over the script for security purposes. Fuchs apologized and said he was very busy at the moment. He suggested that he ask Perrin. So Frisch telephoned Perrin, who agreed to do so.

Shawcross decided that Fuchs should be arrested. He interrupted his election campaigning and returned to London to consult Scotland Yard. The American Government was told as well, because American secrets had also been given away.

The man chosen to arrest Fuchs was the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, the section dealing with subversive activities, Commander Leonard Burt. He conferred with Perrin. They decided that it would be disturbing for Harwell staff if he were arrested there. Burt said, ‘Would you be prepared to ask him to come to your office in Shell-Mex House and not tell him why? Then I can charge him there.’

Perrin said he would, but he did not want to be present when Fuchs was arrested. After all, they had been colleagues and, so far as Fuchs was concerned, they were still colleagues. They decided on a plan. Perrin’s office had two doors; one led to the anteroom, where his secretary sat, and the other led out into the corridor. Perrin and Burt would wait for Fuchs together, but when Fuchs arrived in the anteroom Perrin would go out by the other door, leaving Burt alone to arrest him.