Klaus Fuchs -- Spy

Klaus Fuchs - Spy

In class, we talked about how Stalin was not surprised in hearing about the atomic bomb that the U.S. had created. I did some research on some of the spies that were involved in giving information to the Soviet Union about the Manhattan Project. The most famous spy that I found in my research was Klaus Fuchs.

Klaus Fuchs was born in 1911 as a German citizen. He grew up Lutheran and joined the Communist Party of Germany. However, when the Nazis started to rise to power in 1933, he went to England to study Physics at the University of Bristol. He graduated in 1937 and was also offered the opportunity to study at Edinburgh University.

When World War 2 broke out, he was interned in Canada, but one of the professors from Edinburgh University intervened and Fuchs was allowed to return to Edinburgh. Upon his return in 1941, Rudolph Peierls asked Fuchs to work on the atomic bomb research project in Great Britain. This lead to him becoming a British citizen in 1942. Because of his work on the project in Britain, he was one of the first scientists to be sent to America to work on it. At Columbia University in New York, he worked on a team and conducted research, but he was eventually relocated to Los Alamos, New Mexico where he worked in a weapons laboratory. He was very knowledgeable about the science behind it, especially about the plutonium core of the bomb. He was also present when the Trinity test was conducted.

After the war, it was discovered that he had given information of the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union in 1945. Not only that, but he also gave them information about the hydrogen bomb of 1946 and 47. However, proof that the Manhattan Project had been compromised was not discovered until 1948 and in 1949, Fuchs had returned to Great Britain. While in England, the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment was confronted and accused of telling the Soviets about American plans with the atomic and hydrogen bonds. He confessed to these crimes and was convicted. He was sentenced 14 years in prison.

There was more investigation on the information about the hydrogen bomb that Fuchs had passed on. It was deemed that it was substantial enough to have an impact because the key methods had not yet been discovered in the U.S. while he was working on the project. Because of this, he was released in 1959 and was allowed to emigrate to East Germany. There, he continued his scientific career and died in East Berlin in 1988.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Fuchs.shtml