Klaus Fuchs and the Atomic Bomb

520 Words2 Pages

Did you know that in 1949 we almost gave the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians? Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs was the spy that could have seriously changed our future as we know it. Klaus Fuchs was born into a Lutheran family and eventually joined the Communist Party of Germany. He soon fled to England following the rise of the Nazis in 1933. As a brilliant young scientist, he earned his doctorate in Physics from the University of Bristol in 1937, and was invited to study at Edinburgh University. Klaus Fuchs worked on implosion problems with the atom bomb. His treachery, however was when he delivered sketches of the Fat Man (the first model of the atomic bomb) to his Soviet courier, Harry Gold. In 1943, Fuchs was among the British scientists sent to the U.S. to collaborate on the atom bomb. First, he was assigned to a team at Columbia University in New York. Then he was transferred to the weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he worked in the theoretical division under Hans Bethe. Hans Bethe had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. The information Fuchs passed on about ...

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