The Manhattan Project: The Cold War

The Cold War was an era that lasted from the early 1940s to the late 1980s and is a time in history that is riddled with acts of Soviet and American espionage. Both superpowers employed mass amounts of energy and recourses in attempts to secretly gather valuable information about each other. The Soviet Union was specifically interested in any information concerning the American atomic bomb project at Los Alamos Laborites in New Mexico, which would receive the code name “The Manhattan Project.” The Soviet Union was successful at employing espionage to steal many American secrets concerning the Manhattan project. It was with the help of stolen American secrets which ultimately made it possible for the Soviet Union to build their own version of

Thanks to Espionage it was American secrets that built the Soviets Unions first atomic bomb.

In 1941, the American government began its efforts to design and build an atomic bomb, after a few fundamental scientific milestones, and after the funds had been allocated for the project, the Manhattan project was advanced at a breakneck speed. General Lesley Groves was placed in charge of the Army corps of engineers and was responsible for the building of several facilities that were to be used for the research and development of the atomic bomb. The main assembly plant and headquarters for the Manhattan project were built at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Robert J. Oppenheimer was the head scientist personally selected by General Groves and placed in charge of overseeing and leading a group of elite scientists responsible for the development of the atomic bomb. ‘The Manhattan project employed over 120,000 American workers at its peak and after the final bill for the project had been tallied, nearly $2 billion dollars had been spent on the research and development of the atomic bomb’ . The

The US government had succeeded in keeping the project secret from the Germans, the Japanese and even the American People. But the US government had failed to keep the project secret from the prying eyes of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union Intelligence gathering agencies devoted a tremendous amount of money and resources into the spying and surveillance of the American and British Governments. However, the Soviet Union never was able to get any of their own spies to infiltrate the Manhattan Project, those who did spy for the Soviet Union were Americans and they were the ones who approached the Soviets first and offered to spy for them, most of whom did it for ideological reason. Even though General Groves went through considerable efforts to ensure the security of the Manhattan project it would be learned years after the project had ended that his efforts were not entirely successful. The spies at Los Alamos laboratories gave away secrets about the Manhattan project that were of immense value to the Soviet Union. Three of the better know spies, that we know of, were Klaus Fuchs, ted Hall, and David Greenglass, the most damaging of these three spies was Klaus