Klaus Fuchs: The Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb

“Fuchs had the necessary mental equipment of a spy: the motional self reliance, the ability to do without the approval of others, the ability to live on two lanes at once, being on thing on one plane and quite a different thing on the other. One thinks of Kim Philby who was a husband, lover, hard drinker and a valued and highly competent British intelligent agent, and was also, in a part of his life known to none of his friends and colleagues, an agent of the KGB. IT was fortuitous that Fuchs had this ability. For Fuchs, unlike Ki Philby, unlike George Blake and other double agents in the British intelligence service and several Americans who were found more recently to have served the KOB, did not set out to be a spy.” P. 59
Los Alamos, “more eminent scientists went to work there than have ever gathered in any other place for a prolonged period of time, taking leave of the academic world to vanish behind a wire fence.
“The rendezvous place would be a London underground station, Mornington Crescent. His contact should wait for him there on the first Saturday of each month, at eight o’clock in the evening. He should carry a bundle of books; he himself would carry a copy of Life magazine. P 85
Gouzenko – 5 September 1945, three weeks after the end of the war.
“He was told of a way of restoring contact if it were somehow broken off. He was to go to a house at 166 Kew Road, Richmond, and throw a copy of the magazine Men Only over the garden wall, first writing instructions for the next meeting on page ten. He was then to go to another place and make a chalk mark on the wall. P.104
Thanks to Fuchs, the Russians knew more about the British decision to build an independent nuclear weapon than most British cabinet ministers.
July 1946 McMahon Bill stopped transmission of any information on atomic energy to a foreign power.
Fuchs judgment re information getting into hands of an enemy reminiscent of Manning. “the country to which the information was conveyed need not be na actual enemy. It is enough that the foreign country concerned should be a potential enemy.”
“Fuchs espionage came just at the time when it was likely to have the greatest impact on the United States. Americans were .. still reeling, figuratively speaking, from the shoc of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War…and the more recent news that Russia could now threaten the United States with atomic bombs. P. 170
“Senator Joseph McCarthy began his notorious career as an anti-Communist demagogue in February 1950, the month in which Fuchs was arrested.
Nukes threatens not one country, but the planet, the whole biosphere.
“Fuchs broke promises that he had given freely, his promise of secrecy when he joined the atomic bomb project and his oath of allegiance to the British Crown.” P 183
“A Federal judge in New York City, Judge Irving Saypol, sentenced the Rosenbergs to death because , he said, North Korea would not have started the Korean War if Russia did not have the atomic bomb, and so the Rosenbergs were partly responsible for the deaths of Americans who were killed in Korea. That is certainly possible but it’s speculation.” P. 184