Espionage by Kristie Macrakis;

Author:Kristie Macrakis; [Macrakis, Kristie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Atomic Espionage

One of the most famous cases of Soviet technical espionage was the atomic espionage conducted by the Soviet Union against America and Britain during World War II to learn everything it could about US and British nuclear research and weapons development. Although the story of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 is well known, recently new information has come to light that shows the extent of the infiltration of US and British atomic installations with even more important spies such as Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall. The story of atomic espionage also allows us to explore the question of whether and to what extent the espionage effort helped, one of the most central and neglected questions about scientific-technical espionage.

When Berlin-based scientists discovered nuclear fission in 1938, they never imagined that just seven years later it would enable the United States to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and change the course of history. A nuclear reaction releasing a lot of energy could be used as a source of electric power—or to produce an explosion. As a result, Britain, the United States, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union launched major research projects on nuclear chain reactions.15

By March 1941, the British Maud Committee, consisting of six physicists, concluded in a top-secret report that an atomic bomb could be built in two and a half to three years and was necessary for the war effort. These conclusions led to the creation of an atomic bomb research project in Britain code named the Tube Alloys project. While British officials passed the report on to their American counterparts, a Soviet spy, John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge Five, passed it on to his Soviet spymasters in Moscow. The race was on.

Cairncross was not the only spy who knew about the British atomic bomb efforts. Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who had emigrated to Britain from Nazi Germany, joined the Tube Alloys project in 1941 and became a naturalized British citizen in 1942. In August 1941 Fuchs contacted another German Communist refugee, Jürgen Kuczyinksi, who gave him a contact in the military attaché office at the Soviet Embassy in London. Fuchs walked into the embassy to tell them about his research on the British atomic bomb project and isotope separation. Jürgen’s sister Ursula (Sonya) Kuczynski became his courier to the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Soviet officials were especially interested in the scale of the project. But more importantly, Fuchs was sent to the United States as part of the British mission in December 1943 to work on the Manhattan Project. He eventually made it to Los Alamos, where he could acquire detailed information about the bomb’s design.16

Klaus Fuchs has often been considered the most important atomic spy, in part because more was known about his story. He had confessed in Britain in 1950, where he had returned to work after the war. His confession set off a chain reaction of exposures in the United States, starting with the arrest of his courier, Harry Gold, and David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos.

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