Klaus Fuchs
Encyclopedia
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist
and atomic spy
who in 1950 was convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research (the Manhattan Project
) to the USSR
during and shortly after World War II
. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first fission weapons and later, the early models of the hydrogen bomb, the first fusion weapon.
, Grand Duchy of Hesse
, the third of four children to Lutheran pastor Emil Fuchs and his wife Else Wagner. Fuchs' father was later a professor of theology
at Leipzig University. He became an active Quaker, both in Germany, England, and in the United States. Fuchs' grandmother, mother, and his older sister eventually committed suicide
(his mother in c.1932, his sister in 1939 to avoid capture by the Nazis), while his younger sister was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Fuchs attended both Leipzig University and Kiel University, and while at Kiel became active in politics. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany
and, in 1932, the Communist Party of Germany
. In 1933, after a violent encounter with the recently installed Nazis, he fled to France and was then able to use family connections to flee to Bristol
, England, arriving September 24, 1933. He earned his Ph.D.
in Physics
from the University of Bristol
in 1937, studying under Nevill Mott, and took a DSc at the University of Edinburgh
while studying under Max Born
. His paper on quantum mechanics
, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1936, helped win him a teaching position at Edinburgh the following year.
, German citizens in Britain were interned. Fuchs was put into camps on the Isle of Man
and later in Quebec
, Canada, from June to December 1940. However, Professor Max Born
intervened on Fuchs' behalf. By early 1941, Fuchs had returned temporarily to Edinburgh. He was approached by Rudolf Peierls
of the University of Birmingham
to work on the "Tube Alloys
" program – the British atomic bomb research project. Despite wartime restrictions, he was granted British citizenship
in 1942 and signed an Official Secrets Act
declaration form.
A London message from the GRU
, the Red Army
's foreign military intelligence directorate, dated 10 August 1941, refers to the GRU reestablishing contact with Fuchs. His initial Soviet contact was known as "Sonia". Her real name was Ruth Werner
– a German communist and a Major in Soviet Military Intelligence.
As Fuchs later testified, after Nazi Germany
invaded the Soviet Union
in 1941 he concluded that the Soviets had a right to know what the United Kingdom (and later the United States) were working on in secret. Hence he began transmitting military intelligence to the USSR, though the historical record is unclear about exactly when he started. Fuchs's testimony confirms that he contacted a former friend in the Communist Party of Germany
, who put him in touch with someone at the Soviet embassy in Britain. His code-name was Rest.
In late 1943, Fuchs transferred along with Peierls to Columbia University
, in New York City, to work on the Manhattan Project
. Although Fuchs was "an asset" of GRU in Britain, his "control" was transferred to the NKGB when he moved to New York. From August 1944 Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos
, New Mexico
, under Hans Bethe
. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium
bomb. At one point, Fuchs did calculation work that Edward Teller
had refused to do because of lack of interest. He was the author of techniques (such as the still-used Fuchs-Nordheim method) for calculating the energy of a fissile assembly which goes highly prompt critical
. Later, he also filed a patent with John von Neumann
, describing a method to initiate fusion in a thermonuclear weapon with an implosion trigger. Fuchs was one of the many Los Alamos scientists present at the Trinity test
.
From late 1947 to May 1949, Fuchs gave Alexander Feklisov, his case officer, the principal theoretical outline for creating a hydrogen bomb and the initial drafts for its development as the work progressed in England and America. Meeting with Feklisov six times, he provided the results of the test at Eniwetok atoll of uranium and plutonium bombs and the key data on U.S. production of uranium-235
. By revealing that America was producing one hundred kilograms of uranium-235 and twenty kilograms of plutonium per month, Fuchs made it easy for Soviet scientists to calculate the number of atomic bombs the United States possessed.
Thus, because of Klaus Fuchs, leaders of the Soviet Union knew the United States was not prepared for a nuclear war at the end of the 1940s, or even in the early 1950s. The information Fuchs gave Soviet intelligence in 1948 coincided with Donald Maclean
's reports from Washington, D.C. It was obvious to Josef Stalin's strategists that the United States did not have enough nuclear weapons to deal simultaneously with the Berlin blockade
and the Communists'
victory in China.
Fuchs later testified that he passed detailed information on the project to the Soviet Union through a courier known as "Raymond" (later identified as Harry Gold
) in 1945, and further information about the hydrogen bomb in 1946 and 1947. Fuchs attended a conference of the Combined Policy Committee (CPC) in 1947, a committee created to facilitate exchange of atomic secrets between the highest levels of government of the U.S., Great Britain and Canada; Donald Maclean
, as British co-secretary of CPC, was also in attendance. In 1946 when Fuchs returned to England as the first Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, he was confronted by intelligence officers as a result of the cracking of Soviet ciphers known as the VENONA project
. Under interrogation by MI5
officer William Skardon at an informal meeting in December 1949, Fuchs initially denied being a spy and was not detained. Later, in January 1950, Fuchs arranged another interview with Skardon and voluntarily confessed that he was a spy. Fuchs told interrogators the KGB
acquired an agent in Berkeley, California
, who informed the Soviet Union about electromagnetic separation research of uranium-235 in 1942 or earlier. He was prosecuted by Sir Hartley Shawcross and was convicted on 1 March 1950. He was sentenced the next day to fourteen years in prison, the maximum possible for passing military secrets to a friendly nation. In the infancy of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was nonetheless still classed as an ally, "a friendly nation". A week after his verdict, on 7 March, the Soviet Union issued a terse statement denying that Fuchs served as a Soviet spy.
Fuchs' statements to British and American intelligence agencies were used to implicate Harry Gold
, a key witness in the trials of David Greenglass
and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
in the USA.
once said that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist he knew who truly changed history.
Because of the manner in which the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenti Beria, used foreign intelligence (as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default) it is unknown whether Fuchs's fission information had a substantial effect (and considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium they could procure, it is hard for scholars to accurately judge how much time this saved the Soviets). Some former Soviet scientists said they were actually hampered by Fuchs's data, because Beria insisted that their first bomb ("Joe 1
") should resemble the American plutonium bomb ("Fat Man
") as much as possible, even though the scientists had discovered a number of improvements and different designs for a more efficient weapon.
Whether the information Fuchs passed relating to the hydrogen bomb would have been useful is still somewhat in debate. Most scholars have agreed with the assessment made by Hans Bethe
in 1952, which concluded that by the time Fuchs left the thermonuclear program—the summer of 1946—there was too little known about the mechanism of the hydrogen bomb for his information to be of any necessary use to the Soviet Union (the successful Teller-Ulam design
was not discovered until 1951). Soviet physicists later noted that they could see as well as the Americans eventually did that the early designs by Fuchs and Edward Teller
were useless. However, later archival work by the Soviet physicist German Goncharov has suggested that while Fuchs' early work (most of which is still classified in the United States, but copies of which were available to the Soviets) did not aid the Soviets in their effort towards the hydrogen bomb, it was actually far closer to the final correct solution than was recognized at the time, and indeed spurred Soviet research into useful problems which eventually resulted in the correct answer. Since most of Fuchs' work on the bomb, including a 1946 patent on a particular model for the weapon, are still classified in the United States, it has been difficult for scholars to fully assess these conclusions. In any case, it seems clear that Fuchs could not have just given the Soviets the "secret" to the hydrogen bomb, since he did not himself actually know it.
and a trial
lasting less than 90 minutes, Lord Goddard
sentence
d him to fourteen years' imprisonment
, the maximum for espionage
. In December 1950 he was stripped of his British citizenship. Some claim that his confession was made to avoid the death penalty
, but, according to at least one of his interrogators, he mistakenly believed that he would be allowed back to work at Harwell.
He was released on 23 June 1959, after serving nine years and four months of his sentence at Wakefield Prison, and promptly emigrated to the German Democratic Republic
(East Germany). The tutorial he gave to Chinese physicists helped them to develop the bomb they tested five years later
, according to authors Thomas Reed and Daniel Stillman. (Some have challenged this assertion as unreferenced and unsupported.)
Also in 1959, he married a friend from his years as a student Communist, Margarete Keilson. He continued his scientific career and achieved considerable prominence. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences
and the SED
central committee
, and was later appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf
, near Dresden, where he served until he retired in 1979. He received the Fatherland's Order of Merit and the Order of Karl Marx
.
Klaus Fuchs died near Dresden on 28 January 1988.
See "The Traitors" by Alan Moorehead published by Hamish Hamilton 1952
Theoretical physics
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics which employs mathematical models and abstractions of physics to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena...
and atomic spy
Atomic Spies
Atomic Spies and Atom Spies are terms that refer to various people in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada who are thought to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War...
who in 1950 was convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research (the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
) to the USSR
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
during and shortly after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first fission weapons and later, the early models of the hydrogen bomb, the first fusion weapon.
Early life
Klaus Fuchs was born in RüsselsheimRüsselsheim
Rüsselsheim is the largest town in the Groß-Gerau district in the Rhein-Main region of Germany. It is one of seven special status towns in Hesse and is located on the Main, only a few kilometres from its mouth in Mainz. The suburbs of Bauschheim and Königstädten are included in Rüsselsheim...
, Grand Duchy of Hesse
Grand Duchy of Hesse
The Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine , or, between 1806 and 1816, Grand Duchy of Hesse —as it was also known after 1816—was a member state of the German Confederation from 1806, when the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt was elevated to a Grand Duchy, until 1918, when all the German...
, the third of four children to Lutheran pastor Emil Fuchs and his wife Else Wagner. Fuchs' father was later a professor of theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
at Leipzig University. He became an active Quaker, both in Germany, England, and in the United States. Fuchs' grandmother, mother, and his older sister eventually committed suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
(his mother in c.1932, his sister in 1939 to avoid capture by the Nazis), while his younger sister was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Fuchs attended both Leipzig University and Kiel University, and while at Kiel became active in politics. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...
and, in 1932, the Communist Party of Germany
Communist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned in 1956...
. In 1933, after a violent encounter with the recently installed Nazis, he fled to France and was then able to use family connections to flee to Bristol
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
, England, arriving September 24, 1933. He earned his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in Physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
from the University of Bristol
University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a public research university located in Bristol, United Kingdom. One of the so-called "red brick" universities, it received its Royal Charter in 1909, although its predecessor institution, University College, Bristol, had been in existence since 1876.The University is...
in 1937, studying under Nevill Mott, and took a DSc at the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
while studying under Max Born
Max Born
Max Born was a German-born physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s...
. His paper on quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...
, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1936, helped win him a teaching position at Edinburgh the following year.
Wartime work and espionage
At the outbreak of warWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, German citizens in Britain were interned. Fuchs was put into camps on the Isle of Man
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
and later in Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
, Canada, from June to December 1940. However, Professor Max Born
Max Born
Max Born was a German-born physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s...
intervened on Fuchs' behalf. By early 1941, Fuchs had returned temporarily to Edinburgh. He was approached by Rudolf Peierls
Rudolf Peierls
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, CBE was a German-born British physicist. Rudolf Peierls had a major role in Britain's nuclear program, but he also had a role in many modern sciences...
of the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
to work on the "Tube Alloys
Tube Alloys
Tube Alloys was the code-name for the British nuclear weapon directorate during World War II, when the development of nuclear weapons was kept at such a high level of secrecy that it had to be referred to by code even in the highest circles of government...
" program – the British atomic bomb research project. Despite wartime restrictions, he was granted British citizenship
Citizenship
Citizenship is the state of being a citizen of a particular social, political, national, or human resource community. Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and responsibilities...
in 1942 and signed an Official Secrets Act
Official Secrets Act
The Official Secrets Act is a stock short title used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, India and Malaysia and formerly in New Zealand for legislation that provides for the protection of state secrets and official information, mainly related to national security.-United Kingdom:*The Official Secrets...
declaration form.
A London message from the GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
, the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
's foreign military intelligence directorate, dated 10 August 1941, refers to the GRU reestablishing contact with Fuchs. His initial Soviet contact was known as "Sonia". Her real name was Ruth Werner
Ursula Kuczynski
Ursula Maria Kuczynski was a German author and spy for the Soviet Union. A daughter of Robert René Kuczynski, she joined the Communist party at an early age...
– a German communist and a Major in Soviet Military Intelligence.
As Fuchs later testified, after Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
invaded the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in 1941 he concluded that the Soviets had a right to know what the United Kingdom (and later the United States) were working on in secret. Hence he began transmitting military intelligence to the USSR, though the historical record is unclear about exactly when he started. Fuchs's testimony confirms that he contacted a former friend in the Communist Party of Germany
Communist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned in 1956...
, who put him in touch with someone at the Soviet embassy in Britain. His code-name was Rest.
In late 1943, Fuchs transferred along with Peierls to Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, in New York City, to work on the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
. Although Fuchs was "an asset" of GRU in Britain, his "control" was transferred to the NKGB when he moved to New York. From August 1944 Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
, New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
, under Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...
. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium
Plutonium
Plutonium is a transuranic radioactive chemical element with the chemical symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, forming a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation...
bomb. At one point, Fuchs did calculation work that Edward Teller
Edward Teller
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...
had refused to do because of lack of interest. He was the author of techniques (such as the still-used Fuchs-Nordheim method) for calculating the energy of a fissile assembly which goes highly prompt critical
Prompt critical
In nuclear engineering, an assembly is prompt critical if for each nuclear fission event, one or more of the immediate or prompt neutrons released causes an additional fission event. This causes a rapid, exponential increase in the number of fission events...
. Later, he also filed a patent with John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
, describing a method to initiate fusion in a thermonuclear weapon with an implosion trigger. Fuchs was one of the many Los Alamos scientists present at the Trinity test
Trinity test
Trinity was the code name of the first test of a nuclear weapon. This test was conducted by the United States Army on July 16, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, at the new White Sands Proving Ground, which incorporated the Alamogordo Bombing...
.
From late 1947 to May 1949, Fuchs gave Alexander Feklisov, his case officer, the principal theoretical outline for creating a hydrogen bomb and the initial drafts for its development as the work progressed in England and America. Meeting with Feklisov six times, he provided the results of the test at Eniwetok atoll of uranium and plutonium bombs and the key data on U.S. production of uranium-235
Uranium-235
- References :* .* DOE Fundamentals handbook: Nuclear Physics and Reactor theory , .* A piece of U-235 the size of a grain of rice can produce energy equal to that contained in three tons of coal or fourteen barrels of oil. -External links:* * * one of the earliest articles on U-235 for the...
. By revealing that America was producing one hundred kilograms of uranium-235 and twenty kilograms of plutonium per month, Fuchs made it easy for Soviet scientists to calculate the number of atomic bombs the United States possessed.
Thus, because of Klaus Fuchs, leaders of the Soviet Union knew the United States was not prepared for a nuclear war at the end of the 1940s, or even in the early 1950s. The information Fuchs gave Soviet intelligence in 1948 coincided with Donald Maclean
Donald Duart Maclean
Donald Duart Maclean was a British diplomat and member of the Cambridge Five who were members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union in the Second World War and beyond. He was recruited as a "straight penetration agent" while an undergraduate at Cambridge by...
's reports from Washington, D.C. It was obvious to Josef Stalin's strategists that the United States did not have enough nuclear weapons to deal simultaneously with the Berlin blockade
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War and the first resulting in casualties. During the multinational occupation of post-World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway and road access to the sectors of Berlin under Allied...
and the Communists'
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
victory in China.
Fuchs later testified that he passed detailed information on the project to the Soviet Union through a courier known as "Raymond" (later identified as Harry Gold
Harry Gold
Harry Gold was a laboratory chemist who was convicted of being the “courier” for a number of Soviet spy rings during the Manhattan Project.-Early life:Gold was born in Switzerland to poor Russian Jewish immigrants...
) in 1945, and further information about the hydrogen bomb in 1946 and 1947. Fuchs attended a conference of the Combined Policy Committee (CPC) in 1947, a committee created to facilitate exchange of atomic secrets between the highest levels of government of the U.S., Great Britain and Canada; Donald Maclean
Donald Duart Maclean
Donald Duart Maclean was a British diplomat and member of the Cambridge Five who were members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union in the Second World War and beyond. He was recruited as a "straight penetration agent" while an undergraduate at Cambridge by...
, as British co-secretary of CPC, was also in attendance. In 1946 when Fuchs returned to England as the first Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, he was confronted by intelligence officers as a result of the cracking of Soviet ciphers known as the VENONA project
Venona project
The VENONA project was a long-running secret collaboration of the United States and United Kingdom intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, the majority during World War II...
. Under interrogation by MI5
MI5
The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 , is the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its core intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service focused on foreign threats, Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence...
officer William Skardon at an informal meeting in December 1949, Fuchs initially denied being a spy and was not detained. Later, in January 1950, Fuchs arranged another interview with Skardon and voluntarily confessed that he was a spy. Fuchs told interrogators the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
acquired an agent in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, who informed the Soviet Union about electromagnetic separation research of uranium-235 in 1942 or earlier. He was prosecuted by Sir Hartley Shawcross and was convicted on 1 March 1950. He was sentenced the next day to fourteen years in prison, the maximum possible for passing military secrets to a friendly nation. In the infancy of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was nonetheless still classed as an ally, "a friendly nation". A week after his verdict, on 7 March, the Soviet Union issued a terse statement denying that Fuchs served as a Soviet spy.
Fuchs' statements to British and American intelligence agencies were used to implicate Harry Gold
Harry Gold
Harry Gold was a laboratory chemist who was convicted of being the “courier” for a number of Soviet spy rings during the Manhattan Project.-Early life:Gold was born in Switzerland to poor Russian Jewish immigrants...
, a key witness in the trials of David Greenglass
David Greenglass
David Greenglass was an atomic spy for the Soviet Union who worked in the Manhattan project. He was the brother of Ethel Rosenberg.-Biography:...
and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union...
in the USA.
Value of Fuchs' data to the Soviet project
Hans BetheHans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...
once said that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist he knew who truly changed history.
Because of the manner in which the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenti Beria, used foreign intelligence (as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default) it is unknown whether Fuchs's fission information had a substantial effect (and considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium they could procure, it is hard for scholars to accurately judge how much time this saved the Soviets). Some former Soviet scientists said they were actually hampered by Fuchs's data, because Beria insisted that their first bomb ("Joe 1
Joe 1
The RDS-1 , also known as First Lightning , was the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test. In the west, it was code-named Joe-1, in reference to Joseph Stalin. It was test-exploded on 29 August 1949, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR, after a top-secret R&D project...
") should resemble the American plutonium bomb ("Fat Man
Fat Man
"Fat Man" is the codename for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, by the United States on August 9, 1945. It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons to be used in warfare to date , and its detonation caused the third man-made nuclear explosion. The name also refers more...
") as much as possible, even though the scientists had discovered a number of improvements and different designs for a more efficient weapon.
Whether the information Fuchs passed relating to the hydrogen bomb would have been useful is still somewhat in debate. Most scholars have agreed with the assessment made by Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American nuclear physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and...
in 1952, which concluded that by the time Fuchs left the thermonuclear program—the summer of 1946—there was too little known about the mechanism of the hydrogen bomb for his information to be of any necessary use to the Soviet Union (the successful Teller-Ulam design
Teller-Ulam design
The Teller–Ulam design is the nuclear weapon design concept used in most of the world's nuclear weapons. It is colloquially referred to as "the secret of the hydrogen bomb" because it employs hydrogen fusion, though in most applications the bulk of its destructive energy comes from uranium fission,...
was not discovered until 1951). Soviet physicists later noted that they could see as well as the Americans eventually did that the early designs by Fuchs and Edward Teller
Edward Teller
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," even though he did not care for the title. Teller made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy , and surface physics...
were useless. However, later archival work by the Soviet physicist German Goncharov has suggested that while Fuchs' early work (most of which is still classified in the United States, but copies of which were available to the Soviets) did not aid the Soviets in their effort towards the hydrogen bomb, it was actually far closer to the final correct solution than was recognized at the time, and indeed spurred Soviet research into useful problems which eventually resulted in the correct answer. Since most of Fuchs' work on the bomb, including a 1946 patent on a particular model for the weapon, are still classified in the United States, it has been difficult for scholars to fully assess these conclusions. In any case, it seems clear that Fuchs could not have just given the Soviets the "secret" to the hydrogen bomb, since he did not himself actually know it.
Later life and death
After Fuchs' confessionConfession (legal)
In the law of criminal evidence, a confession is a statement by a suspect in crime which is adverse to that person. Some authorities, such as Black's Law Dictionary, define a confession in more narrow terms, e.g...
and a trial
Trial (law)
In law, a trial is when parties to a dispute come together to present information in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court...
lasting less than 90 minutes, Lord Goddard
Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard
Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard was Lord Chief Justice of England from 1946 to 1958 and known for his strict sentencing and conservative views. He was nicknamed the 'Tiger' and "Justice-in-a-jiffy" for his no-nonsense manner...
sentence
Sentence (law)
In law, a sentence forms the final explicit act of a judge-ruled process, and also the symbolic principal act connected to his function. The sentence can generally involve a decree of imprisonment, a fine and/or other punishments against a defendant convicted of a crime...
d him to fourteen years' imprisonment
Imprisonment
Imprisonment is a legal term.The book Termes de la Ley contains the following definition:This passage was approved by Atkin and Duke LJJ in Meering v Grahame White Aviation Co....
, the maximum for espionage
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
. In December 1950 he was stripped of his British citizenship. Some claim that his confession was made to avoid the death penalty
Capital punishment
Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...
, but, according to at least one of his interrogators, he mistakenly believed that he would be allowed back to work at Harwell.
He was released on 23 June 1959, after serving nine years and four months of his sentence at Wakefield Prison, and promptly emigrated to the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
(East Germany). The tutorial he gave to Chinese physicists helped them to develop the bomb they tested five years later
596 (nuclear test)
596 is the codename of the People's Republic of China's first nuclear weapons test, detonated on October 16, 1964 at the Lop Nur test site. It was a uranium-235 implosion fission device and had a yield of 22 kilotons...
, according to authors Thomas Reed and Daniel Stillman. (Some have challenged this assertion as unreferenced and unsupported.)
Also in 1959, he married a friend from his years as a student Communist, Margarete Keilson. He continued his scientific career and achieved considerable prominence. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences
German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina
The Leopoldina is the national academy of Germany.Historically it was known under the German name Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina until 2007, when it was declared the national academy of Germany.The Leopoldina is currently located in Halle...
and the SED
Socialist Unity Party of Germany
The Socialist Unity Party of Germany was the governing party of the German Democratic Republic from its formation on 7 October 1949 until the elections of March 1990. The SED was a communist political party with a Marxist-Leninist ideology...
central committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
, and was later appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf
Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
The Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf is a German research laboratory in Dresden and member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres...
, near Dresden, where he served until he retired in 1979. He received the Fatherland's Order of Merit and the Order of Karl Marx
Order of Karl Marx
The Order of Karl Marx was the most important order in the German Democratic Republic . Award of the order also included a prize of 20,000 East German marks....
.
Klaus Fuchs died near Dresden on 28 January 1988.
See also
- Atomic spiesAtomic SpiesAtomic Spies and Atom Spies are terms that refer to various people in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada who are thought to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War...
See "The Traitors" by Alan Moorehead published by Hamish Hamilton 1952
Further reading
- Ronald Friedmann: Klaus Fuchs. Der Mann, der kein Spion war. Das Leben des Kommunisten und Wissenschaftlers Klaus Fuchs, 2006, ISBN 3-938686-44-8
- Hans Bethe, "Memorandum on the History of the Thermonuclear Program" (28 May 1952).http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/nuclear/bethe-52.htm
- Rodney P. Carlisle, "Fuchs, Klaus Emil Julius", American National Biography Online Feb. 2000, accessed 24 September 2005.
- Mary Flowers, "Fuchs, (Emil Julius) Klaus (1911–1988)", rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40698, accessed 24 September 2005. (requires library access)
- German A. Goncharov, "American and Soviet H-bomb development programmes: historical background," Physics - Uspekhi 39:10 (1996): 1033–1044.http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/nuke/goncharov-h-bomb.pdf
- Alexei Kojevnikov, Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (Imperial College Press, 2004), ISBN 1-86094-420-5 (discusses use of Fuchs's passed on information by Soviets, based on now-declassified files)
- Ruth Werner :de:Ruth Werner
- Nuclear Secrets Superspy BBC TelevisionBBC TelevisionBBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
, accessed 23 February 2007 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944172/ - Robert Chadwell Williams, Klaus Fuchs: Atom Spy (Harvard University Press, 1987) ISBN 0-674-50507-7
External links
- Visit the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) for the full text of Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks containing more information on Fuchs' involvement in espionage
- An Interactive Rosenberg Espionage Ring Timeline and Archive
- FBI file on Klaus Fuchs
- Biography of Fuchs
- Klaus Fuchs' 1950 confession
- PBS.org on Fuchs, with photo
- German Goncharov on: What the Soviets Learned From Klaus Fuchs
- Communist spy jailed for 14 years (BBC NewsBBC NewsBBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
) - Klaus Fuchs at Carey Sublette's NuclearWeaponArchive.org, which includes information about the specific information given by Fuchs to the Soviets from declassified KGB files
- Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response (CIACentral Intelligence AgencyThe Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
publication), contains letter from agents in 1949 about Klaus Fuchs. - Annotated bibliography for Klaus Fuchs from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
- "Super Spy" 2002 BBC docudrama series, "Nuclear Secrets" part 2 - Fuchs at Los Alamos and later.