Physicist and atom spy, born in Rüsselsheim, WC Germany. He studied at Kiel and Leipzig, and escaped from Nazi persecution to Britain in 1933. Interned on the outbreak of World War 2, he was released and naturalized in 1942. From 1943 he worked in the USA on the atom bomb, and in 1946 became head of the theoretical physics division at Harwell, UK. In 1950 he was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment for disclosing nuclear secrets to the Russians. On his release in 1959 he worked at East Germany's Central Institute for Nuclear Research until his retirement in 1979. He remained a committed communist, and received many honours from the East German Communist Party.
Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (December 29, 1911 – January 28, 1988) was a German-born theoretical physicist and atomic spy who was convicted of surreptitiously supplying information on the British and American atomic bomb research to the USSR during, and shortly after, World War II. Fuchs was highly technically competent, being responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first fission weapons and early models of the hydrogen bomb while a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Early life
Klaus Fuchs was born in Rüsselsheim, Germany, the third of four children to Lutheran pastor Emil Fuchs and his wife Else Wagner.
Fuchs attended university at both Leipzig University and Kiel University, and while at the latter he became active in politics and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany and, in 1932, the Communist Party of Germany.
Wartime work and espionage
At the outbreak of war, German citizens in Britain were interned, and Fuchs was put into camps on the Isle of Man and later in Quebec, Canada, from June to December 1940. By early 1941, Fuchs had returned to Edinburgh, where he was approached by Rudolf Peierls to work on the "Tube Alloys" program — the British atomic bomb research project. After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he would later testify, he began to transmit military secrets to the USSR, believing that the Soviets had a right to know what the United Kingdom (and later the United States) were working on in secret.
In late 1943 Fuchs transferred along with Peierls to Columbia University, New York City to work on the Manhattan Project. From August 1944 Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos, New Mexico under Hans Bethe. While at Los Alamos, Fuchs loaned his automobile on a number of occasions to Richard Feynman, who used the vehicle to visit his dying first wife in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
From the fall of 1947 to May of 1949, Fuchs gave to Alexandre Feklisov, his case officer, the principal theoretical outline for creating a hydrogen bomb and initial drafts for its development, at the stage they were being worked on in England and America in 1948. Fuchs provided the results of the test at Eniwetok atoll of uranium and plutonium bombs. From this the Soviet Union could calculate the number of atomic bombs possessed by the United States, and concluded the United States was not prepared for a nuclear war at the end of the 1940s or even into the early 1950s. The information Fuchs gave Soviet intelligence in 1948 coincided with Donald Maclean's reports from Washington.
Fuchs later testified that he passed detailed information on the project to the Soviet Union through a courier, Harry Gold (whom he knew as "Raymond"), in 1945 and further information about the hydrogen bomb in 1946 and 1947. Fuchs attended a conferance of the Combined Policy Committee (CPC) in 1947, a committee created to faciliate exchange of atomic secrets between the highest levels of government of the U.S., Great Britain and Canada; In 1946 when Fuchs returned to England and the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment, he was confronted by intelligence officers as a result of the cracking of Soviet ciphers known as the VENONA project. Fuchs told interrogators the KGB acquired an agent in Berkeley, California who informed the Soviet Union about electromagnetic separation research of uranium-235 in 1942 or earlier. A week after the verdict, on March 7, the Soviet Union issued a terse statement denying that Fuchs served as a Soviet spy.
Value of Fuchs' data to the Soviet project
Hans Bethe once said that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist he knew who truly changed history. Because of the manner in which the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenty Beria, used foreign intelligence (as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default) it is unknown whether Fuchs' fission information had a substantial impact (and considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium they could procure, it is hard for scholars to accurately judge how much time this saved the Soviets). Some former Soviet scientists said they were actually hampered by Fuchs' data, because Beria insisted that their first bomb ("Joe 1") should resemble the American plutonium bomb ("Fat Man") as much as possible, even though the scientists had discovered a number of improvements and different designs for a more efficient weapon.
Whether the information Fuchs passed relating to the hydrogen bomb would have been useful is still somewhat in debate. Most scholars have agreed with the assessment made by Hans Bethe in 1952, which concluded that by the time Fuchs left the thermonuclear program — the summer of 1946 — there was too little known about the mechanism of the hydrogen bomb for his information to be of any necessary use to the Soviet Union (the successful Teller-Ulam design was not discovered until 1951). Soviet physicists would later note that they could see as well as the Americans eventually did that the early designs by Fuchs and Edward Teller were useless. However, later archival work by the Soviet physicist German Goncharov has suggested that while Fuchs' early work (most of which is still classified in the United States, but copies of which were available to the Soviets) did not aid the Americans in their effort towards the hydrogen bomb, it was actually far closer to the final correct solution than was recognized at the time, and indeed spurred Soviet research into useful problems which eventually resulted in the correct answer. In any case, it seems clear that Fuchs could not have just given the Soviets the "secret" to the hydrogen bomb, since he did not himself actually know it.
Later life
After confessing, Fuchs was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment, and stripped of his British citizenship in December 1950.
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