“Knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country but should be shared with the rest of the world for the benefit of all mankind”. Klaus Fuchs, 2 February, 1950.
Klaus Fuchs was born in Russelsheim, Germany, on 29 December, 1911. His father was a Lutheran Pastor and later Professor of Theology at the University of Leipzig. Klaus was born into a family beset by mental illness. His mother, his sister, and his grandmother died by suicide. Klaus grew into a young man some described as idealistic. He was also exceedingly intelligent.
In the early 1930s, Klaus joined the Communist Party. When Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Klaus fled to England as the Nazis began a purge of Communists, Jews, and others they saw as a danger to the Aryan nation they were building. Klaus was sincere in his communistic beliefs and held to them for the rest of his life.
In England, Klaus enrolled in the University of Bristol and earned a PhD in Nuclear Physics in 1937. He went on to the University of Edinburgh for post doctoral studies and earned a Doctor of Science degree in 1940. In 1941, Klaus joined the British Atomic Bomb Project, referred to by the name “tube alloys”. On 31 July, 1942 he became a British citizen and signed the Official Secrets Act. Between 1943 and 1945, he did early work on the gaseous diffusion method of separating Uranium 235 from the more common Uranium 238. U-235 was the isotope needed to make an atomic bomb. Some of his work was done at Columbia University prior to his relocation to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1944.
At Los Alamos, Klaus was a valuable member of the Manhattan Project. The project got its name as the earliest planning meetings were held in an office in Manhattan. The physicists at Los Alamos were working on two different atomic bomb designs and with two different types of nuclear material; Uranium 235 and Plutonium 239. Klaus led the effort to develop the “lens” necessary to explode a spherical-shaped nuclear weapon. The lens was an arrangement of numerous geometrical shapes locked around a sub-critical mass of nuclear material in the center of the sphere. When specially placed high-explosive charges were simultaneously detonated around the surface of the sphere, the lens would focus the explosive energy, causing the sub-critical mass in the center to compress into a critical mass and begin the nuclear fission process.
In 1941, Klaus Fuchs began to pass detailed design information and test results to the Soviets. At Los Alamos, his contact was a man named Harry Gold who was already working with a number of low-level spies, including Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg, who were convicted and later executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. Klaus was the only spy of any importance, and he was never discovered. Harry Gold offered Klaus lots of money from the Soviets. Klaus refused to accept any reward for his spying.
The Manhattan Project succeeded with a nuclear explosion in the New Mexico desert on the morning of 16 July, 1945. The device exploded was a spherical device using Klaus Fuchs’s lens.
In 1946 and 1947, Fuchs continued to pass information to the Soviets, including information on the much more powerful hydrogen bomb based on the fusion of hydrogen into helium rather than the fission of uranium or plutonium atoms. He returned to England after the war. While under investigation, he voluntarily confessed to his spying. He could not be convicted of treason as the Soviets were England’s ally at that time. Instead, he served nine years for violating the Official Secrets Act. Upon his release in 1959, he returned to East Germany and married fellow communist Grete Keilson. They had no children. Klaus continued his work in nuclear physics. He died in East Berlin on 28 January, 1988 at the age of 76.
It is estimated his spying efforts advanced the Soviet nuclear program by two years. The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb on 29 August, 1949 and their first hydrogen bomb on 12 August, 1953.
By Paul Warrick: March 23, 2026 – Great Falls, Mt
Author: Staff
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