When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby and the Cambridge Five, that preening group of loudmouths that still dominate our national history of Soviet treachery. In his own quiet, devastating way, Fuchs proved more significant than all of them put together.
A brilliant but unassuming German refugee who found sanctuary in Britain, Fuchs rose to become one of the leading theoretical physicists of the Allied nuclear bomb project. As Frank Close, himself an Oxford nuclear physicist, writes: ‘By 1946, Fuchs knew more about the construction of the atomic bomb and the conception of the hydrogen bomb than anyone in the UK and all but a handful in the world.’ And because Fuchs knew it, his KGB handlers knew it too. Judging by this engrossing, brilliantly researched book, they knew it all.
Born in 1911 in Germany, Fuchs was a gifted, socially reticent man. At the University of Leipzig he studied science and mathematics, in which he excelled. He also inherited his father’s socialist leanings, and his political activism brought him to the attention of the Gestapo, which had him down on file as a communist. Fuchs fled the country in 1933, ending up at the University of Birmingham under the wing of Rudolf Peierls, one of the world’s leading theoretical nuclear physicists. Fuchs’s career flourished and as it did so, his work became highly sensitive. Peierls had been one of the first people to realise that nuclear fission could be used as the basis for a weapon of unimaginable power.
It was around this time that Fuchs first started passing secrets to the Soviets. The precise moment when he turned is a matter of conjecture — and that ambiguity is of deep significance.
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