Klaus Fuchs

 

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a scientist who was responsible for many of the theoretical calculations relating to early models of the hydrogen bomb. Through a series of blunders he was allowed to provide British and US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union which turned out to be of major significance.

Klaus Fuchs was born on December 29, 1911, in Rüsselsheim, Germany. His father was a Lutheran minister who was deeply committed to socialist ideology. He taught his son to stand up for what he believed, even if his beliefs were at odds with accepted codes of ethic.

Fuchs came to the UK in 1933 as a communist refugee. As a student at both Leipzig and Kiel Universities, Fuchs became active in politics and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 1932, he became a member of the Communist Party, but after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, his political affiliations made him a target for the Nazis. Fuchs was forced into hiding and managed to flee to France. From there, using family connections, he managed to escape to Bristol, England. As a German refugee, Fuchs was entitled to aid, including a scholarship to Bristol University. By 1937, he had graduated from Bristol with a doctorate in Physics and continued his education with advanced Physics at Edinburgh University. His paper on quantum mechanics entitled Proceedings of the Royal Society gained him a teaching position at Edinburgh, until the outbreak of war in 1939.

By 1940, the war in Europe had escalated and the UK began to fear for its national security. Any Germans living in the UK were taken into custody and put into internment camps. Fuchs was first taken to the Isle of Man but was later transferred to Quebec in Canada, where he stayed from June to December 1940. However, Professor Max Born, who Fuchs had studied under at Edinburgh, intervened and managed to obtain special treatment for the talented, young physicist.

By early 1941, Fuchs had temporarily returned to Edinburgh. Within months, Fuchs was approached by Rudolf Peierls of the University of Birmingham to work on the British ‘Tube Alloys’ programme – the British atomic bomb research project. Despite wartime restrictions, Fuchs was granted British citizenship in 1942 and was asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. It was around this time that Fuchs contacted a former friend in the German Communist Party, who put him in touch with a man at the Soviet Embassy in the UK, whose code name was ‘Rest’.

 

passing over secrets

 

In 1943, Fuchs was transferred, along with Rudolf Peierls, to the Columbia University in New York City. It was here that Fuchs began work on the Manhattan Project, which was the US atomic bomb programme. In August 1944, Fuchs’ work took him to the Los Alamos, New Mexico, research facility, where he was seen as a first-rate scientist and researcher. His colleages later remarked that he was a serious man who focused with great intensity on his work. No one suspected that Fuchs had in fact been passing detailed information regarding the bomb project to a Soviet connection called Harry Gold, code name ‘Raymond’. Fuchs made contact with Gold almost as soon as he arrived in the USA, and at one of their meetings in Santa Fe he gave his contact a precise drawing with measurements of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb. This was the bomb that the USA eventually dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

When the war ended, Fuchs knew everything there was to know about making hydrogen bombs. In April 1946, he attended a three-day, top secret conference at Los Alamos, which outlined the details of work on the new ‘super bomb’.

When Fuchs was asked to return to the UK to continue his work, he made sure he read every document in the Los Alamos archives on thermo-nuclear weapon designs. Once back in the UK, Fuchs started work at the Harwell Atomic Research facility. However, it wasn’t long before he had re-established contact with his Soviet friends.

In 1947, Fuchs met his new contact, Alexander Feklisov, in a pub in north London. Feklisov primed him for details of the new super bomb, and Fuchs described in detail certain structural characteristics of the new weapon. They met for a second time in March 1948, and this time Fuchs handed over specific information that some Russian physicists now say proved to be of great importance to the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

Fuchs’ world of espionage started to crumble at the end of 1949. In 1948, the Venona cables were starting to be deciphered. The Venona Project was a top-secret US effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of what is now called the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. These cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union, including Klaus Fuchs.

One of these cables was a report on the progress of the atomic bomb research, which had been written by Fuchs. At first it was not obvious whether Fuchs had in fact written the report for the Soviets, or whether they had obtained it by other means. Whatever the truth, it was definite proof that the Russians had penetrated the secret of the Manhattan Project.

On December 21, 1949, a British intelligence officer told Fuchs that he was suspected of having given away classified information on nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Although Fuchs repeatedly denied the accusations, he eventually broke down under interrogation and agreed to make a statement. He confessed to his part in the theft of atomic secrets and his trial took place at the Old Bailey in London on March 1, 1950. The court was packed, with over eighty reporters, two US Embassy representatives, the mayor of London and the Duchess of Kent. The chief prosecutor was attorney General Hartley Shawcross, who had made a name for himself at the famous Nuremberg Trials.

The trial only lasted for two hours after Fuchs pleaded guilty, and he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison, which was the maximum possible punishment under British law for the passing of military secrets to a friendly nation. When Fuchs was passing his secrets, the USSR was not an enemy.

Fuchs only served nine years of his sentence, after which he was allowed to leave the UK to relocate in East Germany. He resumed his scientific career and lectured on his beloved Physics. In 1959, he married a friend of his from his years as a student, Margarete Keilson. Fuchs was elected to the Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party central committee, and he was later appointed as deputy director for the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf. He eventually retired in 1979 and died on January 28, 1988.

Whether the information Fuchs passed on regarding neclear weapons was useful is still a matter of debate. Many believe that by the time Fuchs left the project in 1946, too little information was known about the workings of the hydrogen bomb to be deemed of any use. British security were highly criticised after the trial of Fuchs for failing to make appropriate checks on a man who never denied having communist connections.

Ten months after Fuchs was jailed, another Harwell scientist, Professor Bruno Pontecorvo, went missing, and it was later discovered that he had fled to Russia.