Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (nonfiction)

Police photograph of Klaus Fuchs.

Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who, in 1950, was convicted of supplying information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after the Second World War.

While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons, and later, early models of the hydrogen bomb.

Motivation

"John Green says it’s simplistic to describe as a ‘traitor’ the physicist who supplied information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union" (The Guardian, 20 August 2019 12.17 EDT)

Fuchs came from a deeply religious family. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor who became a Quaker after the Lutheran church began collaborating with the Hitler regime. His whole family was persecuted by the Nazis.

His father, brother and sister were incarcerated for speaking out against the regime. His sister and his communist brother-in-law helped organise the escape of Jews and other opponents of the Hitler regime from Germany. Both his mother and sister would kill themselves as a result of Nazi persecution. Fuchs himself joined the Communist party because he felt that the communists were the only ones to effectively oppose the Nazis. As a brilliant physicist he worked on the Manhattan Project, fearing like many of his colleagues that if they did not do so then Hitler would get there first. Once he became aware that Britain and the US were not going to share the new knowhow with the Soviet Union, he was concerned that they might use the bomb against them once Hitler had been defeated.

Fuchs felt that if the Soviet Union had the wherewithal to make its own bomb, this would prevent its misuse by one nation alone. One can deprecate his clandestine leaking of this information to what was at the time an ally, but he was hardly a traitor in the usual sense of the word. He was deeply opposed to war and acted on his conscience. Fuchs should be viewed more as a victim of burgeoning cold war politics than as someone who “betrayed … the country that had welcomed him as a refugee from nazism”.

-- Atom spy Klaus Fuchs was motivated by conscience

Fiction cross-reference

• Manhattan Project

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Manhattan Project (nonfiction)

External links:

• Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs @ Wikipedia