The New Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West

Author:Rebecca West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2010-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

5

FUCHS had reported to Gold at Santa Fe in 1945 that though British and American scientists had been as brothers in the early war years, there were by that time frequent signs of coldness. Not long after there was a further fall of temperature when Alan Nunn May was brought to trial, and with the detection of Fuchs himself five years later the air became icy. The United States forgot its own failures over Hiss and Harry Gold and the Greenglasses and the Rosenbergs; and they preferred to remember that they had given Alan Nunn May and Fuchs very handsome access to American laboratories and classified material because the British authorities had given them clearance which should have been withheld. Such sour feeling between the Western Allies was something the Soviet Union rejoiced to see; and they were all the more pleased when, five months after Fuchs had been convicted at the Old Bailey, a physicist named Bruno Pontecorvo, Italian by birth but like Fuchs a naturalized British subject, left the British Atomic Project at Harwell in suspicious circumstances. When his disappearance became known, it was learned that he was a Communist of many years’ standing and the strongest ties.

Now, this did not raise much panic on the score of what he might have told the Russians. Pontecorvo’s Communism probably did not mean much to him, and it seems unlikely that he would ever have risked more in its service than he needed. He was an attractive and exuberant Italian Jew, thirty-seven years of age, whose great gifts did nothing to sober him and take away his delight in cocktail parties and mild flirtations, in his happy family life with his Swedish wife and their three little sons, in tennis-playing and swimming, and in the pursuit of professorships at the instigation of a cheerful and unjaundiced ambition. It is probable that he joined the Communist party for the same reasons as many another middle-class Italian of his day, because it professed to be the farthest extreme from Fascism and because it looked after its own kind as tenderly as the Mafia or Tammany Hall, and could be of great assistance to a young man in his professional life. In 1936, when Pontecorvo was twenty-three, he left Italy for France, where he worked till the Germans came in 1940, for the most part in the laboratory of the Communist scientist, Professor Frédéric Joliot-Curie. There he must certainly have derived considerable advantage from his party connections, for Professor Joliot-Curie lived in a Communist world. But Portecorvo’s later years, which he spent in the United States, Canada, and England, could have been filled full by his brilliant talent and his gusto, without any political aid. If the party made demands on Pontecorvo, presumably he satisfied them. The chances are that he gave no overweight.

What shocked the British and American public when Pontecorvo went at that moment was not the thought of what he might have given away in secrets. Even had he been a fanatic, this was not an urgent consideration.

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