The release of the hit film Oppenheimer has led to increased public interest in the true story of the Manhattan Project, the effort of a combined team of American and British scientists to create the atomic bomb during World War II. The film accurately shows the conflicted emotions those scientists had about their work, which resulted in the development of the most destructive weapon mankind has ever known, as well as efforts from the Soviet Union to acquire the secrets of the bomb for themselves through the use of spies.

The USSR’s chief spy in the Manhattan Project was also instrumental in its creation: Klaus Fuchs (Author’s Note: Pronounced FEWKS). Fuchs was considered one of the UK’s top scientific minds, and was recruited to work on the atomic bomb project almost from the very beginning of it. Exiled from his native Germany by the rise of Hitler, Fuchs was happy to work on the bomb project because he believed it was necessary to defeat the Nazis. What not even his closest friends and associates realized, however, was that Fuchs was also a devoted Communist who was passing on all the nuclear secrets he was learning to Soviet agents.

Unlike other spies, Fuchs wasn’t motivated by money: he was a true believer in the effectiveness of the Communist system to heal society’s ills, and also that the Western Allies shouldn’t have a monopoly on the atomic bomb: if world peace was to be maintained, a balance of power was required. He continued passing information to the Soviets until he was caught in 1949, much to the embarrassment of the British security services, who had identified him as a possible security risk for years but done nothing about it. His information accelerated the progress of the USSR’s own bomb project, making him, potentially, one of the most consequential spies in history.

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Further Reading:
Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, Penguin Random House 2020

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