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

Fuchs was not motivated in what he did by ambition, or greed. He was selfless. More than most people, he was driven by a moral passion to do what is right. His dilemma was one of conflicting loyalties.

One can require loyalty, but one cannot command it. It would have been wrong for the British authorities to have rejected Fuchs simply because he had once been a member of the German Communist Party (although they would have had good grounds for suspecting him because he concealed the fact). A former attachment to Communism, or some other alternative to our form of government, cannot be taken in itself as an indicator of potential treason. It is not unusual for intelligent young people in particular to look at different ways of organizing society, and to prefer one radically different from their own, and perhaps even opposed to it, nor is it unusual for them to change their minds later on. A woman can demand of her husband that he should not be unfaithful to her, and vice versa. She cannot reasonably demand of him that he never find any other woman attractive. If she is going to make this requirement, she would do best to marry either a blind man or a liar. Mutatis mutandis, if a government requires as a criterion of loyalty unswerving lifelong support for its system, then a lot of people who satisfy this condition will be either fools or good liars.

Loyalty has an exclusive quality. Whether the requirement for it is embodied in an oath of allegiance or a marriage vow, it involves pledging a fidelity to one that is denied to others. A conflict of loyalty arises because two loyalties are mutually exclusive. This is a perennial theme in literature, a conflict between love and duty, or friend and country. And not only in literature: such conflicts occur in real life. Whether something is loyal or treacherous may depend on the perspective. During the Algerian War, when elements in the French Government were trying to curb some of the brutal methods that the army was employing to put down the rebellion, officers of one paratroop regiment took a secret oath on the Bible that if they were questioned by a tribunal about the torture of Arab suspects, they would not tell the truth. They were being resolutely loyal to the men they led, but false to their government; they were taking a solemn oath to break another. During the Watergate goings-on, Deep Throat leaked information about the dirty dealings in the circle around Nixon because, presumably, he rated loyalty to certain standards of conduct, or perhaps to the law, above loyalty to the President.

There is another instance of conflicting loyalties that is more directly pertinent to the case of Klaus Fuchs. It has never been told in print before.

During World War II, an American Air Force officer stationed in Britain somehow picked up a sketchy idea of a secret weapon programme that seems to have been the atomic bomb project. He thought, wrongly, that this was an American project from which Britain was excluded, and about which the British Government knew nothing. He evidently brooded on the morality of this, and then decided to act. By pulling strings, he got an appointment with the Chief of the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir John Portal. He told Portal that since arriving in Britain, he had been very impressed by the suffering that the British people had endured in the war and the fortitude with which they had borne this. Then he said that his government, the American Government, was engaged on a programme to build an important new weapon and was keeping this secret from Britain, its ally. He thought this was wrong, and he wanted -

At this point, Portal stood up and said, ‘Get out of this office at once! If you say another word, I’ll call your superior officer and have you arrested and court martialled.’ [23] Portal, as Viscount Portal of Hungerford, became head of the atomic energy programme after the war; he told this story to another official of the programme after Fuchs was sent to prison, and this official told it to me. — NM

Clearly, Portal was right. Certainly his was a military man’s natural reaction. The American officer had no right to disobey orders and take it upon himself to reverse his government’s actions. He was being disloyal to his government and his oath of loyalty as an officer. But many people would at least sympathize with his motives. Even Portal did, to the extent of sparing him arrest and court martial.

Certainly Emil Fuchs saw it that way. Some time after his son was sent to prison, he told the writer Robert Jungk that he had ‘the highest respect’ for his son’s decision to do what he did, and he went on: ‘He was justly condemned under British law. But there must always be from time to time people who deliberately assume such guilt as his… They have to take the consequences of their resolute affirmation that they see a position more clearly than those who have the power, at that juncture, to deal with it. Should it not be clear by this time that my son acted with more accurate foresight in the interests of the British people than did their government?’ [24] Quoted in Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns .

Fuchs broke promises that he had given freely, his promise of secrecy when he joined the atomic bomb project and his oath of allegiance to the British Crown, and betrayed a trust that others had placed in him. This is treachery. This kind of betrayal corrodes the bonds that bind people to one another, and pollutes the social environment with mistrust.

Yet most of us, like Emil Fuchs, place a high value on individual morality, and the right of each person to work out for himself what is right and wrong. This is one of the great achievements of Western humanism. Because we do, we take a chance that someone will decide, as Fuchs did, that any degree of betrayal is justified in this or that higher cause. The risk of a Klaus Fuchs every now and again is a price we pay for individualism.

After the defection to Moscow of another Harwell scientist, Bruno Pontecorvo, and the trial and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy examined all the cases of which came to be called atomic espionage. Their report, in April 1951, rated Fuchs by far the most important, and said: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Klaus Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy, not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of nations.’ The report also said: ‘If the United States had known early in World War II what Russia had learned by 1945 through espionage, it would have saved eighteen months.’

Others have come to a similar conclusion. Rudolf Peierls was at an international physics conference once and was chatting with a Russian physicist who had worked on the Soviet atomic bomb. He asked him how much difference Fuchs’s information had made. The man said he would like to consult a couple of his colleagues before answering. Then he came back and said they decided it had saved Russia between one and two years.

One cannot say how much if at all the world changed because Russia acquired the atomic bomb sooner than it would have otherwise. A Federal judge in New York City, Judge Irving Saypol, sentenced the Rosenbergs to death because, he said, North Korea would not have started the Korean War if Russia did not have the atomic bomb, and so the Rosenbergs were partly responsible for the deaths of the Americans who were killed in Korea. This is certainly possible, but it is speculation. [25] It is a plausible supposition. The Hungarian General Bela Kiraly, who commanded a Soviet Bloc army before he fled to the West after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, told an interviewer that Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb allowed Russia to give North Korea the go-ahead to invade. ‘It gave Stalin a kind of security that the Soviet Union was no longer a target which could not reciprocate in kind,’ he said. See Michael Charlton, The Eagle and the Small Birds , BBC, London, 1984.