Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Fuchs, (Emil Julius) Klaus (December 29,1911- January 28, 1988)

Fuchs was a German Born British physicist who participated in the British and American projects to produce atomic bomb and who spied for the Soviet Union. Klaus Fuchs was the first major atomic espionage case following World War II.

Fuchs arrived in Britain from Germany in 1933, He earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Bristol, before moving to Edinburgh University for post doctoral study. Then he went to work in the field of quantum mechanics.

In 1939, Fuchs defended his second doctoral dissertation in mathematics.

He was interned in 1940 and spent some time in a Canadian detention camp but, at the urging of prominent scientists in Britain he returned in 1941 to work on the atom bomb project at Birmingham University.

Taking full advantage of his access to top secret information, Fuchs began to pass vital technical information to Soviet agents almost immediately. He continued to do so in the USA after he joined the research team working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in November 1943.

In 1946, Fuchs left Los Alamos and moved to the British Energy Establishment at Harwell. Fuchs became head of the physics department at the Harwell Atomic Research facility in Great Britain, where he continued his work in developing an initiator for the hydrogen bomb with mathematician John von Neumann.

The following year he began passing secrets to the Soviets. Not until 1949 did Fuchs fall under suspicion, when US cipher experts managed to break Soviet intelligence codes, Fuchs eventually confessed to senior M15 officer and was sentenced to fourteens years in prison.

On 1 March 1950, Klaus Fuchs was found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union.

His evidence was used to incriminate his contact in the USA. Fuchs was released in 1959 and went to East Germany, where he became deputy director of the Central Institute of Nuclear Research at Rossendorf, near Dresden.
Fuchs, (Emil Julius) Klaus (1911-1988)

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