The Spy Who Changed the World: Klaus Fuchs, Physicist and Soviet Double Agent
400
The Spy Who Changed the World: Klaus Fuchs, Physicist and Soviet Double Agent
400Hardcover(Reissue)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510726741 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2017 |
| Edition description: | Reissue |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 1,012,365 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Trinity
Klaus Fuchs stood in a crowd of scientists and guest visitors on the crest of some high ground known as Compania Hill. It was 4.30 on a dark and cold morning in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. The disparate group on the hill had been building up since two o'clock, climbing out of army buses, stiff-limbed and shivery after the night drive from Los Alamos. As they did so, they looked east towards a faraway tower illuminated by the white beams of searchlights. The weather had been foul that night, with strong, buffeting winds of 30 miles an hour, rain and lightning adding to the drama and tense uncertainty of the occasion.
Fuchs was a boyish-looking man of thirty-four, slim, with a full bottom lip and a quizzical way of staring through his spectacles that seemed calculated to disarm. He lit a cigarette and glanced around, picking faces out of the darkness. There was his nominal boss, Hans Bethe, head of the Theoretical Division, a brilliant physicist, a fellow German and, like Fuchs, a refugee from the Nazis. Fuchs had great respect for Bethe, not just for his intellect but also for his patience and strength of character. Fuchs recognized several others. There was his friend and colleague Rudolf Peierls, head of the British scientists at Los Alamos, a German Jew from Berlin with whom Fuchs had worked since joining him at Birmingham University in 1941. There was the Hungarian Edward Teller, another theoretical physicist whom Fuchs knew had a powerful intellect, but who was also stubborn, with a giant ego. Impatient with Bethe, Teller had walked out of the Theoretical Division, ironically making space for Fuchs and Peierls to take over his work.
James Chadwick had travelled all the way from Washington to be there. A Nobel prizewinner, he was in charge of the British Scientific Mission to the United States, and therefore in charge of Fuchs and Peierls. Chadwick was part of that British nuclear physics aristocracy who had studied under the early giants like Hans Geiger and Ernest Rutherford, and whose discovery of the subatomic particle called the neutron had paved the way for the event that they had all assembled here to watch.
On top of the tower, barely visible 15 miles away across the valley floor, was a small corrugated-iron hut. In it was an assembly of curiously shaped blocks of high explosive, formed to make a sphere about 1.5 metres in diameter. Inside this globe sat two pieces of a rare and exotic metal called plutonium. They too were joined in the shape of a sphere, but much smaller, about 15 centimetres in diameter. The two halves of the sphere of plutonium were plated in a thin coat of shiny nickel and gold. Plutonium was so radioactive that it was warm to the touch; one scientist described it as like holding a baby rabbit. Its very existence was highly secret, and its formation into the small, finely machined artefact that nestled in this cradle of high explosive was what the group of young scientists on the hill, and the hundreds more in the base camp and in the instrument bunkers closer to the tower, had all been striving for.
Fuchs had no precise idea of the size of the effort involved, but he knew that in fact the intricate assembly of explosive and metal represented the culmination of the work of thousands of scientists and engineers, from more or less the complete range of professions and disciplines that a modern society supported. The speed at which things happened in the United States constantly surprised him. Fuchs had come from bombed and blacked-out Britain, where everything was scarce or rationed and it was hard to do anything. Here in the United States the food was plentiful, the energy and resources seemed limitless.
The workers in huge mines, factories and laboratories across the whole of North America, and the scientific elites of two continents, had worked with unremitting energy to produce the object that sheltered from the winds and rain in the corrugated-iron hut on top of the tower. The whole effort had been so secret that President Harry Truman, taking office after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in May, had only recently learned of it. Now here they were, after all the frustrations, delays and mistakes of an unprecedented scientific and engineering programme, with just one question remaining. Would it work?
The scientists around Fuchs and the others in the base camp knew that they bore a special responsibility for the answer. The assembly on the tower was the final expression of the science of nuclear physics, a science that was barely fifty years old. The early pioneering work on radiation by Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie had started a process of experimentation that revealed the structure of atoms and the particles that composed them. This work also showed the possibility that the nucleus of atoms contained enormous energy, and that the atoms of some radioactive metals could release this very quickly. In precisely what form, and how quickly, were the basic questions that had occupied Fuchs, Bethe and scores of the other scientists now on Compania Hill. The assembly on the tower was the size and shape that it was not because an engineer had told them that was the easiest way to make it. Rather it was because Fuchs and his colleagues in the Theoretical Division had calculated the exact shape and size it needed to be to release the energy in the atoms of the plutonium, and release them so quickly that a huge explosion would be the result.
The small ball of plutonium would be instantly compressed when the surrounding explosives detonated and the existing radiation in the form of neutrons would enter the nucleus of other atoms and split them. This would release more neutrons to repeat the process, and it would do so at a speed that would quickly encompass all the atoms, releasing their energy simultaneously. It should create, they calculated, an enormous explosion — so big that for safety even the base camp had to be 10 kilometres away from the tower.
Already there had been some alarming questions raised about the outcome. Two days earlier a trial test of the sphere of explosives, which must detonate in perfect synchronization and create a uniform shock wave, had failed.
Bethe and others in the Theoretical Division who had been responsible for the original calculations had spent hours going over their work and looking at the trial test results. They finally concluded that they had been correct, and it was the trial test results that were wrongly recorded. So the test with the real thing was going ahead. But there was no escaping the anxiety. If any one of the mathematicians or scientists had it wrong and this highly expensive and secret sample of plutonium was wasted, then General Leslie Groves, head of the US atom bomb programme, the Manhattan Project, would be relentless in his pursuit of the culprit. Crucifixion might be a preferable option.
Many of the scientists knew that there was more than one way to get it wrong, and in the last few days there had been a lot of discussion about whether the whole project had transformed into something that they had not originally bargained for. People like Peierls, Bethe, Fuchs and other key scientists had fled the fascist regimes that spread across Europe like the Black Death in the 1920s and early 1930s. German universities were home to some of the most creative centres of theoretical physics, and everyone knew that there were German scientists prepared to carry on their work under the Nazis. The dreadful possibility that Hitler would have a nuclear weapon in his hands before the Allies had been the constant spur for everyone working on the Manhattan Project. Now things had changed. Hitler was dead. Nazi Germany had surrendered unconditionally in May. War in Europe was over, and fascism had been defeated. The war against Japan was still raging in the Pacific, but Japanese cities were being razed to the ground by raids from long-distance Boeing B-29s and everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the Japanese would also be defeated. Why was work on the atomic weapon still being relentlessly prosecuted?
Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian now naturalized as a US citizen, had first imagined the possibility of a chain reaction of nuclear fission back in 1933. He had, with the Italian Enrico Fermi, dreamed up the idea of a nuclear reactor and in 1939 had sent a letter, signed jointly with Albert Einstein, to President Roosevelt urging him to authorize work on some form of nuclear weapon.
Now he was actively lobbying against using the weapon. He arranged meetings with Robert Oppenheimer, scientific leader of the vast Manhattan Project, and General Groves. He sought out Jimmy Byrnes, who had been one of President Roosevelt's closest personal advisers. Szilárd believed simply that using the weapon — even showing the world that it existed — would start an uncontrollable arms race. He was horrified to learn that the US government's thinking was that using it against Japan would be a useful tool in negotiating with the Soviet Union about the shape of the post-war world.
Other scientists thought that, rather than being used against Japan, the bomb should be exploded somewhere remote, in a demonstration that would encourage the Japanese government to surrender.
The protests of Szilárd and others met swift rebuttal. How can we not use the bomb if it would shorten the war against Japan by several months? How many lives, of both American soldiers and Japanese civilians, would that save? The nation had invested the vast sum of $2 billion in the Manhattan Project. There had to be a visible result for that. As the arguments went back and forth, the truth gradually sank in. Scientists had created a new source of energy, whose power still had to be fully tested, but they did not control it. Politicians and the military would decide how and where it was used.
As they stood in the cold, grey dawn of the New Mexican desert, however, most of those questions had receded to the backs of their minds. There was only the one really urgent issue now: would it work?
As the time for the test drew near, conversations grew quieter. Tension rose. This had to work. A day ago, when Bethe and the others had gone through the calculations to find out why the explosives test had failed, there was the odd doubt that they had missed something, or that there had been an unforgivable mistake in an equation. Fuchs was now certain that it would work. The only question was how big an explosion, measured in tonnes of TNT equivalent, would the device produce.
Ten minutes before the scheduled detonation, a green signal rocket was fired into the air and a siren sounded at base camp, heard by the men on the mountain some seconds later. There was an expectant shifting. They had been told not to look directly at the blast for fear of being blinded. They were to turn their backs, and welders' goggles had been offered to protect their eyesight. Now, though, as the test shot became imminent, the urge to see was overwhelming, and people made sudden last-minute decisions not to wear their goggles, or to get out of their cars and brave the ultraviolet radiation. A second rocket fired, then another blast of the siren, lonely and mournful. Five minutes to go, and men who were used to calculating in nanoseconds were gripped by a stomach-churning combination of anxiety and excitement. Would it work? Five minutes seemed endless.
Then a final rocket to mark a minute's countdown. Edward Teller, who had abandoned work on the plutonium bomb because he wanted to work on the potentially more powerful hydrogen bomb, started to cover his face with thick suntan lotion and put on heavy gloves to protect his hands from the flash. A shortwave radio squawked into life, and they heard the last seconds of the countdown.
Almost 20 miles away a bright flash appeared, and grew, filling the dark pre-dawn with a penetrating daylight, like the sun at high noon. A strange globe rose in the sky. Fuchs later remembered that it seemed alien, and magnificent, with weird flashes of blue and green pulsating on its surface. Then it expanded and was eclipsed by a huge shock wave. Fuchs and the others on Compania Hill continued to watch as the fireball seemed to subside and a great purplish column rose up into the sky. Then they heard the blast, like the crack of a gun, then duller thunder, as echoes crossed the desert and rebounded from the hills to the east.
Everyone was shocked into silence by the sight. It had worked.
As they looked up at the giant cloud that rose into the sky, it dawned on them that it was over 20,000 feet high. They had been almost blinded by an explosion that was 20 miles away. Fuchs knew that the blast had been far bigger than most of the estimates produced at Los Alamos. The men whose brainchild this had been were stunned by what they had witnessed. The results of their work had exceeded the imagination. They returned to Los Alamos, quieter, and pensive, still trying to absorb the experience of being eyewitnesses to the explosion of the first atomic weapon in the history of mankind.
Fuchs said that, as he walked away, someone asked him, "Now what will happen? How will we use this?" He replied, "It's too late to ask that."
Five days later the British physicist William Penney, who had set up experiments to study the blast effects of the explosion, held a seminar at Los Alamos. His preliminary calculations based on the first test results suggested that an equivalent bomb would destroy a city of around four hundred thousand people. Not a building left undamaged. Not a person left unharmed.
CHAPTER 2The Interview
Four and a half years later, on 19 December 1949, Klaus Fuchs was working at his desk in his office at Harwell, a former Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire, now the home of Britain's Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Since the first nuclear explosion in New Mexico, Fuchs had become an important part of Britain's nuclear hierarchy. He was now the deputy head of the Theoretical Division of the establishment at Harwell, which was at the centre of the British government's effort to build an independent nuclear industry. There was the promise of economic benefits from nuclear energy, but more important was the development of nuclear weapons, considered vital to maintain Britain's status as a world power.
Harwell had expanded greatly since its former life as an airbase. The security perimeter was stronger, a small village of prefabricated houses had been built on surrounding land to accommodate the influx of scientific and administrative staff, and the offices and workshops had multiplied. Some of the old aircraft hangars survived, however, and now they housed Europe's first nuclear reactor, known as GLEEP, a small experimental atomic pile that had gone critical — in other words, a nuclear reaction had started — in 1947. Harwell also ran a cyclotron for research into subatomic particles, and a new electronic computer, which had started operations early that year. Fuchs sat on the various committees and working parties that managed all these facilities, as well as others around the country. A full-size nuclear reactor to produce plutonium was under construction at Windscale in Cumberland, and other sites at Capenhurst in Cheshire and Springfields in Lancashire were producing enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons research at Fort Halstead in Kent. Fuchs was busy. His experience of the first very early atomic research in Britain and later at Los Alamos, as well as his theoretical brilliance, meant that he was consulted about everything in the British nuclear programme.
Fuchs was working with many colleagues who had become friends in the years since 1933 when he had landed in the UK as a refugee student. His immediate superior was Herbert Skinner, whom he had first met when they were both studying at Bristol University shortly after Fuchs's arrival in the country. Egon Bretscher, a colleague from Los Alamos, was head of the Nuclear Physics Division at Harwell. Fuchs remained close friends with Rudolf Peierls, who had gone back to Birmingham to continue his academic career after the war but was still a consultant to the Department of Atomic Energy.
Fuchs had also become quite friendly with Harwell's head of security, a former Royal Air Force wing commander, Henry Arnold. Fuchs never complained about the strict checks on movements in and out of Harwell, or Arnold's sometimes persistent questions about visitors. In fact, he had met with Arnold a few weeks earlier to talk about a problem that was concerning him. His father Emil, a Quaker, had continued to live in Germany throughout the war. He had been imprisoned and tried by the Nazis in the 1930s, but had been treated leniently because of intense lobbying about his case from the international Quaker movement and the American Friends Service Committee.
Emil had been an active socialist, a member of the German Social Democratic Party and a pacifist. He had visited his son earlier that year, bringing with him Fuchs's nephew, Klaus Kittowski, and they had both been introduced to many of Fuchs's associates and colleagues. The problem now was that Emil had been offered a lecturing post at the University of Leipzig in the Soviet zone of Germany and he was eager to take it up.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Spy Who Changed the World"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Mike Rossiter.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments v
Introduction: A Trip to Moscow 1
1 Trinity 13
2 The Interview 21
3 The Commitment 32
4 We'll Always Have Paris 44
5 Asylum 54
6 Interned 67
7 The Biggest Secret 77
8 A Lady from Banbury 92
9 Allies in Name 109
10 Mission to New York 120
11 Camp Y 134
12 The End Result 147
13 After the Bomb 162
14 Dangerous Days 178
15 Pillar of the Establishment 190
16 The Third Contact 204
17 The Next Big Thing 216
18 A Family Affair 233
19 The Hunt 240
20 Hey Joe 255
21 Trailing Mr. Fuchs 268
22 The First Encounter 277
23 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back 290
24 Confession 300
25 Trial 318
26 A Visit from the FBI 335
27 Legacy 347
Epilogue: Fuchs: the Final Chapter? 363
Bibliography 373
Index 379