April 7, 2021
Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs
Nancy Thorndike Greenspan
Author, Member of the American Institute of Physics Foundation
Lanny Jones, Introducer, and Nancy Thorndike Greenspan
Minutes of the 27th Meeting of the 79th Year
President Stephen Schreiber opened the Old Guard Zoom Webinar for 152 computer links at 10:15 AM. Patti Daley read her minutes of the meeting on March 31, 2021. President Schreiber welcomed to the meeting Dr. Bill Leahy, guest of Lanny Jones; Miles Gordon, guest of Ugy Horowitz; Chris Rice, guest of John Kelsey; and Judy Funches, guest of Christine Danser.
Lanny Jones introduced Nancy Greenspan, the author of Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs which was her topic today. Ms. Greenspan has been a health economist and was the co-author of several books on child psychiatry and psychology with her late husband, Stanley Greenspan. Her first biography was The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born. Born was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Greenspan is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Physics Foundation. An ice dancer, she spends her free time at the rink. She spoke to the Old Guard Zoom meeting from her home in Bethesda, Maryland.
She started her talk by reminding us this was not a spy story; it was a story about a spy. Klaus Fuchs was a man of mystery and complexity: German by birth, British by naturalization, and Communist by conviction. While he has been mythologized as an isolated, reserved, lonely, frail individual, only one of those adjectives is true. He was naturally reserved, but what really defined him was a steady determination to support social, political, and economic equality as he saw it.
Born in 1911 in a small town near Frankfort, Fuchs grew up during World War I and its aftermath in the Weimar Republic and then contributed to developing the bomb that ended World War II. His father was a liberal minister in a very conservative Lutheran church. As a teenager, Klaus was a top student in mathematics, and not yet an activist. However, during his years at the University of Leipzig and then the University of Kiel he joined the Communist party. By 1933 he was wanted by the Gestapo and he fled to Paris and then England. He ended up at the University of Bristol where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics. Next, he was a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh under Max Born.
In 1940, Britain decided to intern 30,000 German nationals and Fuchs was sent to Canada. He was released in 1941 and returned to work on gaseous diffusion, a process to separate uranium isotopes, at the University of Birmingham. Fuchs socialized with other communists in the internment camps and met one who was a recruiter for Russian intelligence.
At the end of 1943, Fuchs sailed to New York City with a British scientific team to work on the US gaseous diffusion project at Kellex, a contractor for the project. The British did not tell the FBI about Fuchs’ communist connections. Fuchs gave as much information as he could to his Russian contact in New York.
In July 1944 Fuchs transferred to Los Alamos to work on the plutonium bomb. He worked on the mathematics involved to fire explosive charges with a proper shock wave to compress a sphere of plutonium to a critical mass density. This was a key problem in creating a plutonium bomb. Just a few weeks before the first test of a plutonium bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Fuchs left Los Alamos to deliver the plans to his contact in Santa Fe. Los Alamos guards searched his car but missed seeing the plans in his jacket pocket.
While he was at Los Alamos, he was Richard Feynman’s next-door neighbor. They become good friends. One night they discussed who might be a spy at this secret facility. They decided Feynman might be.
Fuchs returned to England in the summer of 1946 and became the head of theoretical research at the top‑secret nuclear facility at Harwell, near Oxford. Russian spies were being arrested in the United States and Canada, so Fuchs laid off spying for a while. A year later he made contact with a new Russian agent in London.
In August 1949 United States and the United Kingdom code breakers deciphered some earlier Russian messages that contained evidence there was a spy in the Manhattan Project. These clues and others led British MI-5 and the FBI to suspect Fuchs. They couldn’t arrest him as that would mean exposing the decoding activity that exposed him. Instead, they monitored him closely, hoping to catch him passing secrets. Fuchs spotted his followers immediately. Then MI-5 sent in its top interviewer and didn’t get a confession.
Fuchs, on his own volition, confessed in January 1950. His short trial in the Old Bailey was a media sensation. He received an unexpectedly harsh sentence of 14 years. He was paroled after 9 years and left England for Germany in 1959. He was appointed deputy director of the national research facility in Dresden. He worked on breeder reactors to replace the brown coal that was used in East Germany and detrimental to everybody. He was promised he could do this but was essentially abandoned. He was devastated.
In the United States, J. Edgar Hoover blamed MI-5 for the security lapse. The knowledge that there had been a Russian spy in the atom bomb project also fanned the flames of the 1950s Red Scare hysteria and supported the attacks on civil liberties by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others.
Fuchs’s short-term goal had been to create a bomb before the Germans. He wanted nuclear balance and eventually called for disarmament. He was 77 when he died of lung cancer in 1988. He was buried in the East Berlin cemetery for noted communists and had a funeral with processions and a string quartet. It is estimated that Fuchs had enabled Russia to get an atom bomb two or three years ahead of the time it might have taken otherwise. The Soviet government had made no acknowledgement of his help. On this occasion, however, they sent a large wreath and a government official who was a young KBG agent named Vladimir Putin.
Respectfully submitted,
Jock McFarlane
Lanny Jones introduced Nancy Greenspan, the author of Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs which was her topic today. Ms. Greenspan has been a health economist and was the co-author of several books on child psychiatry and psychology with her late husband, Stanley Greenspan. Her first biography was The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born. Born was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Greenspan is a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Physics Foundation. An ice dancer, she spends her free time at the rink. She spoke to the Old Guard Zoom meeting from her home in Bethesda, Maryland.
She started her talk by reminding us this was not a spy story; it was a story about a spy. Klaus Fuchs was a man of mystery and complexity: German by birth, British by naturalization, and Communist by conviction. While he has been mythologized as an isolated, reserved, lonely, frail individual, only one of those adjectives is true. He was naturally reserved, but what really defined him was a steady determination to support social, political, and economic equality as he saw it.
Born in 1911 in a small town near Frankfort, Fuchs grew up during World War I and its aftermath in the Weimar Republic and then contributed to developing the bomb that ended World War II. His father was a liberal minister in a very conservative Lutheran church. As a teenager, Klaus was a top student in mathematics, and not yet an activist. However, during his years at the University of Leipzig and then the University of Kiel he joined the Communist party. By 1933 he was wanted by the Gestapo and he fled to Paris and then England. He ended up at the University of Bristol where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics. Next, he was a post-doc at the University of Edinburgh under Max Born.
In 1940, Britain decided to intern 30,000 German nationals and Fuchs was sent to Canada. He was released in 1941 and returned to work on gaseous diffusion, a process to separate uranium isotopes, at the University of Birmingham. Fuchs socialized with other communists in the internment camps and met one who was a recruiter for Russian intelligence.
At the end of 1943, Fuchs sailed to New York City with a British scientific team to work on the US gaseous diffusion project at Kellex, a contractor for the project. The British did not tell the FBI about Fuchs’ communist connections. Fuchs gave as much information as he could to his Russian contact in New York.
In July 1944 Fuchs transferred to Los Alamos to work on the plutonium bomb. He worked on the mathematics involved to fire explosive charges with a proper shock wave to compress a sphere of plutonium to a critical mass density. This was a key problem in creating a plutonium bomb. Just a few weeks before the first test of a plutonium bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Fuchs left Los Alamos to deliver the plans to his contact in Santa Fe. Los Alamos guards searched his car but missed seeing the plans in his jacket pocket.
While he was at Los Alamos, he was Richard Feynman’s next-door neighbor. They become good friends. One night they discussed who might be a spy at this secret facility. They decided Feynman might be.
Fuchs returned to England in the summer of 1946 and became the head of theoretical research at the top‑secret nuclear facility at Harwell, near Oxford. Russian spies were being arrested in the United States and Canada, so Fuchs laid off spying for a while. A year later he made contact with a new Russian agent in London.
In August 1949 United States and the United Kingdom code breakers deciphered some earlier Russian messages that contained evidence there was a spy in the Manhattan Project. These clues and others led British MI-5 and the FBI to suspect Fuchs. They couldn’t arrest him as that would mean exposing the decoding activity that exposed him. Instead, they monitored him closely, hoping to catch him passing secrets. Fuchs spotted his followers immediately. Then MI-5 sent in its top interviewer and didn’t get a confession.
Fuchs, on his own volition, confessed in January 1950. His short trial in the Old Bailey was a media sensation. He received an unexpectedly harsh sentence of 14 years. He was paroled after 9 years and left England for Germany in 1959. He was appointed deputy director of the national research facility in Dresden. He worked on breeder reactors to replace the brown coal that was used in East Germany and detrimental to everybody. He was promised he could do this but was essentially abandoned. He was devastated.
In the United States, J. Edgar Hoover blamed MI-5 for the security lapse. The knowledge that there had been a Russian spy in the atom bomb project also fanned the flames of the 1950s Red Scare hysteria and supported the attacks on civil liberties by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others.
Fuchs’s short-term goal had been to create a bomb before the Germans. He wanted nuclear balance and eventually called for disarmament. He was 77 when he died of lung cancer in 1988. He was buried in the East Berlin cemetery for noted communists and had a funeral with processions and a string quartet. It is estimated that Fuchs had enabled Russia to get an atom bomb two or three years ahead of the time it might have taken otherwise. The Soviet government had made no acknowledgement of his help. On this occasion, however, they sent a large wreath and a government official who was a young KBG agent named Vladimir Putin.
Respectfully submitted,
Jock McFarlane