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

It is given to few scientists to have so direct an influence on the course of international relations as Fuchs had.

The influence of the case did not stop there. A year later, in February 1951, scientific attaché Alec Longair cabled the Foreign Office from the Washington embassy concerning scientific and technical co-operation in general: ‘The arrest and conviction of Klaus Fuchs had effects which went very deep indeed. It is easy to blame everything on this, but the truer position is that a technical co-operation programme which was not working well before Fuchs’s arrest is now working very badly. It should be remembered that we for our part have gone very cautiously in making suggestions since the Fuchs business.’

For the revelation of Fuchs’s espionage came just at the time when it was likely to have the greatest impact on the United States. Americans were preoccupied at this time with the Cold War. America was still reeling, figuratively speaking, from the shock of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, which joined China to what was then the Soviet Bloc, and the more recent news that Russia could now threaten the United States with atomic bombs. Communism was seen as a threat from within as well as without, and anti-Communist hysteria and spy fever were growing. This was the beginning of the time of loyalty oaths and blacklists, and the withdrawal of passports from suspected radicals, which was later declared illegal by the Supreme Court. (Edward Corson’s passport was taken away from him as he was about to sail for France, after he had sent that cable to Fuchs assuring him that he believed in his innocence. It was given back to him only after he explained his position.) Clamorous voices on the far Right were blaming setbacks in American policy on spies and traitors: the Communist victory in China on Communist sympathizers among the old China hands in the State Department, the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe on Alger Hiss and State Department liberals. As Acheson indicated in his memoirs, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his notorious career as an anti-Communist demagogue in February 1950, the month in which Fuchs was arrested, with his famous speech before an audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he brandished before them a sheaf of papers which he claimed was a list of 200 Communists in the State Department. With the Fuchs case, this current of irrationality mingled inextricably with reasonable concerns over security.

Arthur Krock, the senior Washington columnist of the New York Times, said the case was ‘a bombshell’ in official Washington, and added that it ‘has had an impact, and a powerful one, on the entire government of the United States, for reasons which stretch far beyond the interests of national security’.

The witch-hunters of the Right felt confirmed in their views. Senator Homer Capehart said: ‘There are other spies too, and there will continue to be so long as we have a President who refers to such matters as “red herrings” and a Secretary of State who refuses to turn his back on Alger Hiss.’ (This referred to two off-the-cuff remarks that were widely quoted.) Senator John Bricker said: ‘I’ve always opposed the use of foreign scientists on atomic projects. The arrest of Fuchs makes me even more certain that I am right about this.’

The Joint Senate-House Committee on Atomic Energy began hearings in secret to find out how much information had been given to the Russians. The British sent them the full text of Fuchs’s confession, including the parts that were not read out in open court, and also his account to Perrin of what he had told the Russians. The Chairman, Senator Brian McMahon, told reporters that he had been shocked before he saw these documents, and now he was even more shocked. The Committee were anxious most of all to know how much Fuchs knew about the super, the hydrogen bomb that was now to be developed. After all, Russia already had a fission bomb now.

Senator McMahon said they were considering asking for Fuchs to be extradited so that he could stand trial in America for acts of espionage that he had committed in America, but the Committee’s counsel advised them that Fuchs’s breach of domestic British law took precedence, and that the British Government would not extradite him.

The Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, gave the Committee a sombre account of the damage that Fuchs could have done, emphasizing that he was at the centre of things at Los Alamos and would have known most of what there was to know. But he also advised them: ‘Let’s not panic the country. Keep your shirt on. Don’t wallow in it. And let’s hope this won’t disturb the Los Alamos outfit, or investigations so harass everyone that the new super programme is held up.’ Like a number of other people, he was worried that the case might give more impetus to witch-hunts. He had cause to worry, for the case was indeed used to further political and personal ends.

President Truman had followed his statement of 10 January about developing the hydrogen bomb with an announcement on 10 March that he had instructed the Atomic Energy Commission to ‘continue work’ on it, meaning that it was not only going to be developed but produced (although no one knew how to produce a hydrogen bomb or even whether it could be done). He had been under considerable pressure from some members of the AEC, and others, to make this announcement, and go all out to build the hydrogen bomb as soon as possible. Five days after this, one of the AEC members who had urged him to make the announcement, Admiral Lewis Strauss, talked on the telephone with J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, about Fuchs’s statement, which he had just seen. As Hoover recorded in a memorandum immediately after this conversation, Strauss said that if these statements were published, ‘It will very much reinforce the hand of the President on the strength of the decision he made a few days ago.’

Strauss also asked Hoover to look into any links between Fuchs and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. The Director of the Institute was Robert Oppenheimer, who was also now Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee. He was Strauss’s principal opponent in the argument over whether the United States should develop the hydrogen bomb now — Oppenheimer and his committee had advised against it — and on other issues.

Strauss was not alone in trying to use the Fuchs case to get at Oppenheimer. The Executive Director of the Joint Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee was William Borden. He noted in a letter to Strauss that Fuchs had indicated that the Russians had another source of information at Los Alamos; Borden had someone in mind. Later, when he left the Committee to take a job in business, he spelled it out, and wrote to Hoover that Oppenheimer was ‘more probably than not an agent of the Soviet Union’. This letter set off the process that ended in the Oppenheimer hearings and the removal of his security clearance, an event that was for many Americans a climax of the assaults on the liberal intellectuals.

The FBI found that it already had Fuchs’s Communist past on record but no one had noticed it, and the FBI, understandably, did not point it out now. The information was in Gestapo files that were brought to the United States in 1945, and indexed in 1948. On the eve of Germany’s invasion of Russia, the Gestapo had drawn up a list of 5,000 Germans associated with pro-Soviet or Communist activities. One entry read: ‘Fuchs, Klaus, student of philosophy, born 29 December 1911, Russelsheim, RSHA IVA, Gestapo Field Office, Kiel. (RSHA stands for Central Office of Security Police.) In these days of computerized files, this one would have interacted with others, such as a list of participants in the atom bomb project, and would almost certainly have come to the attention of the security authorities.