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The Shadow Dossier — The Physicist Who Gave Away the Bomb · The Shadow Dossier

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  the shadow dossier act i a refugee's conviction
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  klaus fuchs left germany in 1933 as a young physicist
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  and a committed communist one step ahead of the
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  nazi regime that had already marked him for arrest
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  britain took him in By the outbreak of the Second
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  World War, he had built a career as a gifted
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  theoretical physicist and had even been naturalized
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  as a British subject, despite a brief internment
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  as an enemy alien in the war's early, suspicious
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  months. His talent brought him into Britain's
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  own atomic weapons research, the program known
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  by the deliberately dull cover name Tube Alloys.
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  In 1944, as Britain and the United States merged
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  their nuclear efforts, Fuchs was sent to Los
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  Alamos, New Mexico, the heart of the Manhattan
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  Project, where the first atomic bombs were being
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  designed. Act II, what he handed over. At Los
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  Alamos, Fuchs worked on the implosion design.
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  the method used to compress a plutonium core
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  with precisely timed conventional explosives
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  until it went critical the harder and more elegant
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  of the two bomb designs built during the war
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  it gave him access to some of the most sensitive
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  engineering details in the entire project Beginning
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  in 1943 and continuing through 1949, Fuchs passed
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  detailed information to Soviet intelligence contacts,
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  first in Britain and then through contacts in
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  the United States. His own explanation was not
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  money or blackmail. He believed, with the same
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  conviction that had made him a communist as a
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  young man fleeing fascism, that no single nation
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  should hold a monopoly on knowledge capable of
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  ending the war or starting the next one. Fuchs
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  was identified through the Venona program, a
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  long -running American and British effort to
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  decrypt intercepted Soviet intelligence cables.
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  many of which have been considered unbreakable
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  when first sent. Painstaking work through the
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  late 1940s gradually recovered fragments of messages
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  describing a physicist's source at Los Alamos,
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  and by 1949 investigators had narrowed the search
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  enough to name Fuchs directly. Confronted by
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  British intelligence in January 1950. Fuchs confessed
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  fully and specifically, providing detail that
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  helped investigators pursue other members of
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  the network around him, including the courier
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  who had carried his information onward. He was
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  convicted under the Official Secrets Act and
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  sentenced to 14 years. A lighter sentence than
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  espionage charges in the United States would
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  likely have carried, since Britain and the Soviet
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  Union had been wartime allies for much of the
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  period in question. Intelligence historians consider
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  Fuchs one of the most consequential spies of
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  the entire Cold War. not for the volume of what
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  he passed, but for its precision. The Soviet
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  Union tested its first atomic bomb in August
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  1949, years ahead of what most Western analysts
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  had expected, and Fuchs's detailed implosion
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  design information is widely credited with shortening
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  that timeline substantially, changing the balance
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  of the earliest years of the nuclear age. Fuchs
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  served nine years of his sentence and was released
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  in 1959. Stripped of his British citizenship,
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  he moved immediately to East Germany, where he
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  was welcomed as a returning hero of the socialist
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  cause. He resumed a research career at a nuclear
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  institute near Dresden, eventually rising to
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  deputy director and remained there for the rest
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  of his life. He died in 1988. A year before the
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  Berlin Wall fell. Having spent his final decades
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  in the state his information had helped arm.
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  This concludes declassified file number 0051
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  of the Shadow Dossier. The physicist who gave
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  away the bomb. What dangerous secrets await in
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  our next file? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
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  RSS .com, and YouTube so you never miss an official
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  declassification. This is the Shadow Dossier.
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  Thank you for listening.