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

Certainly if Russia’s acquisition of the atomic bomb was linked to the outbreak of the Korean War, then Fuchs was the person in the West who was principally responsible.

There was one more blow in store for Fuchs. In December 1950 the British Deprivation of Citizenship Committee said it proposed to take away his citizenship. Under the British Nationality Act 1948, Section 10, Subsection A, a person having been naturalized can be deprived of his citizenship ‘if he has shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards His Majesty’. Before this can be done, a hearing must be held, and the person has the right to speak. The final decision rests with the Home Secretary.

Sir Hartley Shawcross gave evidence before the committee, and said that the only consideration in the question was ‘whether it is in the public interest that Fuchs should continue as a British subject’.

Fuchs did not avail himself of his right to appear before the committee, but he wrote a letter arguing that his citizenship should not be taken away, and this was read out.

He wrote:

If this was intended as punishment for my actions, there would be little that I could say except that I have already received the maximum sentence permissible by law. However, section 20 of the British Nationality Act 1948, to which you refer, appears to exclude the intention of punishment. I assume, therefore, that the question under consideration is my present and future loyalty.

Lest silence on my part should be interpreted as an indication that even now I do not appreciate the values and obligations of citizenship of this country, I wish to submit the following representations to the Secretary of State. [26] The Home Secretary, whose formal title is Secretary of State for Home Affairs.

I cannot expect the Secretary of State to accept an assurance of loyalty from me. However, I wish to submit that — in order to determine the matter in a judicial manner — the Secretary of State should obtain the opinion of those Government departments which have been concerned with my case, that is, M15 and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

My disloyal actions ceased early in 1949 before any suspicion had been voiced against me. I had received no relevant promise and no substantial threat. I was not forced to confess by any evidence.

I think the facts mentioned would have been of great value in a plea in mitigation. I have loyally co-operated with MI5 and the FBI although no threat or promise has been made to me at any time before or after my trial.

I submit that these facts show that in making my confession and in my subsequent actions, I was guided by my convictions and loyalties, and that they show clearly where my loyalties are.

Despite this plea, the Committee recommended that his citizenship be taken away from him, and this was done. Fuchs thought he had found a home, and now he was expelled.

Skardon still used to visit him in prison; M15 wanted to keep in touch with him in case new questions arose which he might be able to answer. But now Fuchs told Skardon that their friendship, as he called it, was ended. ‘If you were a policeman and I was arrested for burglary,’ he said to him, ‘and I came clean and gave you all the help I could, I would expect you to do all you could to help me.’ Skardon protested that he could not have stopped the committee taking away his British nationality, but Fuchs told him he did not want to see him any more.

After three months at Wormwood Scrubs, he was transferred to Stafford Prison, where he sewed mailbags, and then six months later, to Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire. This is a prison for long-term prisoners, many of them, in the nature of things, violent criminals. As an eminent criminal much written about in the newspapers, he had considerable status among the prisoners when he arrived, and was treated with respect.

The long-term prisoners at Wakefield had individual cells, so he did not share one. He behaved in prison much as he did outside. He was quiet, reserved and self-contained; he did not mix much. He occasionally played chess with other prisoners, and because he was a skilful player he used to start without a queen, to give his opponent the advantage, but still he always won. A few prisoners doing correspondence courses in physics or maths asked his help, and he gave it. He also wrote some articles explaining physics in simple terms for the Wakefield Prison magazine, and acquired the nickname ‘the Doc’. He was assigned congenial work in the prison library.

He used to read a lot, particularly Marxist classics. He had some long talks on philosophical questions with one of the assistant governors, Gordon Hawkins, who had a degree in philosophy and did postgraduate work in the subject at Balliol College, Oxford. Fuchs would expound the philosophy of dialectical materialism. He gave Hawkins In Defence of Materialism by Georgi Plekhanov, one of the classics of Marxist philosophy, to read and they discussed it.

They talked about world affairs as well as philosophy. Fuchs followed the Rosenbergs’ case, and when they were sentenced to death he remarked that he was lucky that he had not been convicted in America; there, he would have been executed.

He noted Sir Winston Churchill’s famous depiction in 1955 of the thermonuclear balance of terror, after both America and Russia had exploded a hydrogen bomb: ‘A paradox has emerged. Let me put it simply. After a certain point has been passed, the worse things get, the better. The broad effect of the latest development is to spread almost indefinitely, or at least to a great extent, the area of mortal danger… Then it may well be that, by a process of sublime irony, we shall have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.’

Fuchs pointed this out to Hawkins, and said, ‘I suppose the process of sublime irony won’t extend to my being released, as a benefactor of the human race.’ It was a wry joke. Fuchs, by helping the Russians build the atomic bomb, had certainly done his bit to put balance into the terror.

When the first sputnik went up, and there was some fanciful talk of the exploration of space and putting men on the moon, Fuchs explained to Hawkins lucidly and patiently why this was impossible. You might send a rocket to the moon, he explained, but you could not bring a vehicle back because of the heat that would be generated when a fast-moving object hits the Earth’s atmosphere. He even made some rough calculations to demonstrate the point. Once again, he had underestimated the resources of modern technology. He could foresee the re-entry problem, but not that it would be solved.

He discussed his crime with Hawkins, and said again that he regretted deeply having betrayed his friends at Harwell and, in particular, Henry Arnold. He said nothing about any other betrayal.

After Fuchs had served some years, Hawkins asked him what he intended to do when he got out. Fuchs said he could not stay in Britain now that his British nationality had been taken away. (This was not necessarily so.) He said he did not want to go to a country in the Communist bloc, and in any case he could not. ‘I couldn’t go east of the Iron Curtain because over there I’m regarded as being largely responsible for the arrest of Harry Gold and David Greenglass, and for the execution of the Rosenbergs,’ he explained.

He noted that Alan Nunn May had gone to teach at the University of Ghana after he was released from prison, and that J. B. S. Haldane, a leading British biologist and long-time Communist who had recently broken with Communism, had gone to India. The idea of going to the Third World appealed to him. ‘I think I’ll go to India,’ he told Hawkins. ‘There, I could do useful work, and they are neutral in the East — West conflict, which is where I stand.’