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

In August 1986, when the Soviet Union was pressing the United States to sign a nuclear test ban to include underground tests, he wrote an article in Neues Deutschland, the official Communist Party newspaper, appealing for a worldwide ban on nuclear tests. ‘The history of humanity cannot be allowed to end in an atomic inferno,’ he wrote. ‘I appeal to all men of goodwill who care about the future of our planet. Let us stand up for a ban on all nuclear weapons tests.’

He attended a colloquium held in East Berlin to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of Max Planck’s first paper on quantum theory. He presented a paper on the philosophical implications of the theory, although largely to dismiss them, in strict Marxist materialist terms. Underlining his orthodoxy, he quoted Marx in his paper: ‘The question of whether human thought is capable of objective truth is not a question of theory but a practical question.’ And he quoted Lenin: ‘There is no abstract truth; truth is always concrete.’ Coincidentally, another paper at this colloquium was read by Bruno Pontecorvo, who defected from Harwell the year after Fuchs was arrested and was given a post at a nuclear research institute near Moscow.

Fuchs was honoured in East Germany both for his scientific and his political work, although no reference was ever made to his espionage on behalf of the Communist cause. He was elected to the German Democratic Republic’s Academy of Sciences, and also to the Communist Party Central Committee. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Fatherland, and the Order of Karl Marx. On his seventieth birthday, the East German Communist leader, Erich Honneker, sent him a message saying: ‘You can look back on a successful career as a Communist, a scientist and a university teacher.’

When Victor Weisskopf went to East Germany to give some lectures, he told scientists he met there that he would like to see Fuchs. Weisskopf has been deeply concerned with the moral and political implications of the manufacture of nuclear weapons ever since Los Alamos, and has often been critical of American policies. Fuchs telephoned him and invited him to lunch at a smart restaurant.

They talked about politics. Weisskopf criticized the Soviet Union on a number of issues: civil rights, Afghanistan, the treatment of Jews. Fuchs defended the Soviet Union all the way, but as always he spoke quietly and without passion. He would say to Weisskopf, mildly, ‘No, I’m afraid you don’t understand the situation,’ or ‘I don’t think you’re right about that.’

Weisskopf raised the treatment of Andrei Sakharov, the dissident Soviet physicist, and Fuchs became unexpectedly vehement, although he still spoke quietly. ‘Sakharov is a traitor,’ he said. ‘He wants the United States to have more missiles than the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities are treating him very well. These people deserve a harsher punishment.’

Fuchs’s father lived for many more years to enjoy his son’s success and prestige in his own country. He died in 1971, at the age of ninety-six. He wrote his autobiography, which was published in two slender volumes. He told an English friend that there was a third volume in manuscript form, which was to be published only after his death. ‘I am not altogether popular with the authorities,’ he explained with a twinkle. The manuscript has never been found.

Fuchs’s sister in America, Kristel Heineman, recovered from her illness, married a second time and had three more children. Among others involved in Fuchs’s story, Harry Gold was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for his role as a courier. He was brought out of prison to give evidence at the Rosenbergs’ trial, and also at the trial of his former boss, Abraham Brothman, who was said to have passed secrets to Soviet agents. He was paroled in 1966, and died of heart disease in Philadelphia in 1972. Sir Rudolf Peierls moved to New College, Oxford, in 1963 and retired in 1974, and is now Professor Emeritus at Oxford University and the University of Washington in Seattle; at the time of writing he still travels widely. Lady Peierls accompanied him on his travels, until she died of a brain disease in October 1987. Sir Nevill Mott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977. Herbert Skinner died in 1960 at the age of fifty-nine; his wife Erna died in 1975, of an asthma attack, at a gathering in the home of a friend from Harwell days. Henry Arnold retired from Harwell and went to live in the seaside town of Sandbanks, and died there at the age of eighty-eight. William Skardon retired to Torquay, and died there in 1988; MI5 had refused to allow him to write his memoirs.

Hans Bethe earned a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967; his younger colleague, Richard Feynman, was awarded one two years earlier. Otto Frisch died in 1981. Klaus Kittowsky added his grandfather’s name to his own and became Fuchs-Kittowsky, and followed an academic career; he is now a Professor of Information Technology at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. Igor Kurchatov, hailed as ‘the father of the Soviet atomic bomb’, died in 1960 at the age of fifty-seven, heaped with honours — Stalin Prize, Order of Lenin, member of the Soviet Parliament. Jurgen Kuczynksi lives in retirement in East Berlin; he recently confirmed for a West German television team his role in putting Fuchs in contact with Soviet agents.

Fuchs retired in 1979. He remained in good health for some years, although he was even thinner than he had been, almost gaunt, and was balding. He devoted a lot of his time to the officially sponsored peace movement. This always follows the Party line, but it would be simplistic to dismiss all its participants as nothing more than puppets. Most of them have chosen the area in which they wish to express their concern, and this was Fuchs’s choice. He gave a number of lectures urging progress towards nuclear disarmament.

When the Soviet Congress of Scientists held a conference in 1983 in Moscow to discuss the prevention of nuclear war, Fuchs was invited as a guest speaker. Another guest invited from abroad was Josef Rotblat, one of the heads of the Pugwash Movement, founded to join scientists of the world in working against nuclear war, and Rotblat found himself sitting next to Fuchs. It was some time before he recognized him; he had not seen him since Los Alamos days, and he did not know him very well there. Fuchs, in his talk to the conference, recalled Niels Bohr’s letters to Roosevelt and Churchill pointing out the dangers of the nuclear arms race. Adhering always to Soviet orthodoxy, he also quoted Lenin, and denounced the SDI, the United States ‘star wars’ anti-missile defence programme.

Fuchs died suddenly, on 28 January, 1988, a month after his seventy-seventh birthday. The official announcement did not give the cause of his death.

The East German Press carried tributes to his work as a scientist and a political activist, but did not mention his espionage activities. ADN, the official East German news agency, carried a fulsome obituary, saying:

‘His scientific achievements in the field of theoretical physics and his consistent actions for Socialism and the maintenance of peace have brought him high national and international esteem.

‘As a Socialist scientist, university teacher, Communist and loyal friend of the Soviet Union, he participated for two decades, successfully and creatively, in the development of the power industry.’

East German newspaper readers, unless they had other sources of information, would have no idea of Fuchs’s principal contribution to the Communist cause.

Acknowledgment of this came six months later, in a Soviet television documentary about the Soviet atomic bomb programme shown during the first full flowering of glasnost.

Fuchs featured prominently in this film. It showed his participation in the wartime atomic bomb programme in America and said: ‘Fuchs knew that the bomb was a secret from Russia. He did not think this was right, and he gave data about the bomb to the Russians.’ It also showed footage of Fuchs in East Germany, reading a British newspaper, and said that up until the time he died, he never repented what it called his ‘awesome choice’. As we know, the truth is more complex.