Atomic spies



"Atomic spies" and "Atom spies" are terms that refer to various people in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada who are thought to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War. Exactly what was given, and whether everyone on the list gave it, is still a matter of some scholarly dispute, and in some cases what were originally seen as strong testimonies or confessions were admitted as fabricated in later years. Their work constitutes the most publicly well-known and well-documented case of nuclear espionage in the history of nuclear weapons. There was a movement among nuclear scientists to share the information with the world scientific community, but that was firmly quashed by the American government.

The modern day sharing of nuclear technology with Iran, Libya, North Korea and possibly other regimes on the part of Abdul Qadeer Khan has yet to be fully explored. It is an open question whether the term "atom spy" will be applied to those operating outside the Cold War period, such as Khan and Argentine-American physicist Leonardo Mascheroni.

Whether the information significantly aided the speed of the Soviet atomic bomb project is also disputed. While some of the information given could have aided in developing a nuclear weapon, the manner in which the heads of the Soviet bomb project actually used the information has led scholars to doubt its role in increasing the speed of development. According to this account, Igor Kurchatov and Lavrenty Beria used the information primarily as a "check" against their own scientists' work and did not liberally share the information with them, distrusting both their own scientists as well as the espionage information. Later scholarship has also shown that the decisive brake on early Soviet development was not problems in weapons design but, as in the Manhattan Project, the difficulty in procuring fissile materials, especially since the Soviet Union had no uranium deposits known when it began its program (unlike the United States).

Confirmation about espionage work came from the VENONA project, which intercepted and decrypted Soviet intelligence reports sent during and after World War II. These provided clues to the identity of several spies at Los Alamos and elsewhere, some of whom have never been identified. Some of this information was available, but not usable in court for secrecy reasons, during the trials of the 1950s. As well records from Soviet archives, which were briefly opened to researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union, included more information about some spies.

Importance of Atomic Spies
Before the beginning of World War II, the theoretical possibility for nuclear fission was a highly discussed topic among the top physicists in the world. The elite scientists in the Soviet Union had made theoretical breakthroughs in nuclear physics and many of the scientists won Nobel Prizes for their contribution in this field. Soviet scientists knew that in theory nuclear fission would have military implications and had the theoretical knowledge to embark on this project. This process of applying the theory of fission to bomb-making would require vast amounts of money, a large supply of uranium and plutonium, and the development of new techniques for purification. All of these elements were in short supply in the newly-formed USSR was coupled with the threat of the Nazi invasion. The combination of the Soviet Union's industrial infancy and the impending war with Hitler’s Germany led to a degree of resource scarcity that worked against complex research and development projects.

The United States, in collaboration with the British and (after the war) West Germans, had sufficient resources at their disposal. During the quest to create an atomic bomb it is estimated by Schwartz that four hundred million dollars, eighty-six thousand tons of silver, and twenty-four thousand skilled workers biweekly to drive the research and development phase of the project. Those skilled workers included the people to maintain and operate the machinery necessary for research. The largest allied facility had five-hundred scientists working on the project as well as a team of fifty to derive the equations for the cascade of neutrons required to drive the reaction. The situation was quite different for the USSR as Soviet program consisted of fifty scientists and a mere two mathematicians trying to work out the equations for the particle cascade. The research and development of techniques to produce pure enriched uranium and plutonium would have been a much greater and more time consuming task for the insufficiently staffed and funded Soviet program. The knowledge of techniques and strategies that were being employed in the American, German and British programs that the Soviet Union procured through espionage played a significant role in rapid development of the Soviet bomb.

The research and development of methods suitable for doping and separating the highly reactive isotopes needed to create the pay load for a nuclear warhead took years of vast dedicated resources. The allies of the United States and Great Britain dedicated their best scientists to this cause and constructed three plants each with a different isotope extraction method. The allied program decided to use a gas phase extraction to obtain the pure uranium necessary for an atomic detonation. To find this method it took large quantities of uranium ore and other rare metals such as graphite to successfully purify the U-235 isotope.

The Soviet Union did not even have natural uranium ore mines known at the start of the nuclear arms race. A lack of materials made it very difficult to undergo a research and development phase attempting all methods for uranium and plutonium purification. This was on top of the fact that the purification was an area of extreme difficulty for the Soviet scientists. The Soviet scientists were experiencing degradation of their supposed pure U-235 isotope due to a lack in their development of the techniques and mathematical understanding of the element. Without the information acquired through espionage, the problems the Soviet atomic team experienced would have taken much longer to rectify and thus the development of weapons grade elements would have been significantly delayed.

The missing element that explains the great leaps in the Soviets Union’s atomic program is the espionage information and technical data Moscow was able to obtain from the Manhattan project. Upon the realization of the American plans to develop an atomic bomb during the 1930s, Moscow began actively seeking agents to get information. Moscow was very specific in asking for information from their intelligence cells in America and demanded updates on the progress of the allied project. Moscow was also greatly concerned with the procedures being used for U-235 separation, what method of detonation was being used, and what industrial equipment was being used for these techniques. To obtain this information from the Manhattan project, the Soviet Union needed spies that first of all, had security clearance high enough to have access to classified information, and could secondly, understand and interpret what they were stealing. Moscow also needed reliable spies who believed in the communist cause and would provide accurate information. One such Soviet spy was Theodore Hall, who had been a developer on the bombs dropped in Japan. Hall gave up the specifications of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. This information allowed the Soviet scientists a firsthand look at the successful set up of an atomic weapon built by the Allied team.

Although Hall’s information was helpful to the cause, the most influential of the atomic spies was Klaus Fuchs. Klaus was a German-born British physicist who was sent to America to work on the atomic project where he became one of the lead scientists. Klaus became a member of the Communist Party while he was still a student in Germany. At the onset of World War II Klaus fled to Great Britain to escape the fighting, where he became a one of the lead nuclear physicists in the British program and was later sent to collaborate on the Manhattan project. Due to Fuchs’s position in the atomic program he had access to most, if not all, of the material Moscow desired. Klaus was also able to interpret and understand the information he was stealing, which made him an invaluable resource. Klaus provided the Soviets with detailed information on the gas phase separation process. He also provided specifications for the pay load, calculations and relationships for setting of the fission reaction, and schematics for labs producing weapons grade isotopes. This information helped the smaller undermanned and undersupplied Soviet scientists with a hard push in the direction of the successful detonation of a nuclear weapon.

The Soviet nuclear program would have eventually been able to develop a nuclear weapon without the aid of espionage. This would have required much more time due to the sheer amount of research and development of the techniques and industrial equipment needed to successfully produce a fission bomb. The information passed helped the Soviet scientists identify which methods worked and prevented wasting valuable resources on techniques proven ineffective in the development of the American bomb. The speed at which the Soviet nuclear program achieved a working bomb with so few resources was driven by the amount of information acquired through espionage.

Notable atomic spies



 * Morris Cohen – American, "Thanks to Cohen, designers of the Soviet atomic bomb got piles of technical documentation straight from the secret laboratory in Los Alamos," the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said. Morris and his wife, Lona, served eight years in prison, less than half of their sentences before being released in a prisoner swap with The Soviet Union. He died without revealing the name of the American scientist who helped pass vital information about the United States atomic bomb project.


 * Klaus Fuchs – German-born British theoretical physicist who worked with the British delegation at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. After Fuchs' confession there was a trial that lasted less than 90 minutes, Lord Goddard sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment, the maximum for violating the Official Secrets Act. He escaped the charge of espionage because of the lack of independent evidence and because, at the time of the crime, the Soviet Union was not an enemy of Great Britain. In December 1950 he was stripped of his British citizenship. He was released on June 23, 1959, after serving nine years and four months of his sentence at Wakefield prison. He was allowed to emigrate to Dresden, then in the German Democratic Republic.


 * Harry Gold – American, confessed to acting as a courier for Greenglass and Fuchs. He was sentenced in 1951 to thirty years imprisonment. He was paroled in May 1966, after serving just over half of his sentence.


 * David Greenglass – an American machinist at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Greenglass confessed that he gave crude schematics of lab experiments to the Russians during World War II. Some aspects of his testimony against his sister and brother-in-law (the Rosenbergs, see below) are now thought to have been fabricated in an effort to keep his own wife, Ruth, from prosecution. Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in prison, served 10 years, and later reunited with his wife.


 * Theodore Hall – a young American physicist at Los Alamos, whose identity as a spy was not revealed until very late in the 20th century. He was never tried for his espionage work, though he seems to have admitted to it in later years to reporters and to his family.


 * George Koval – The American born son of a Belorussian emigrant family that returned to the Soviet Union where he was inducted into the Red Army and recruited into the GRU intelligence service. He infiltrated the US Army and became a radiation health officer in the Special Engineering Detachment.  Acting under the code name DELMAR he obtained information from Oak Ridge and the Dayton Project about the Urchin (detonator) used on the Fat Man plutonium bomb.  His work was not known to the west until he was posthumously recognized as a hero of the Russian Federation by Vladimir Putin in 2007.


 * Irving Lerner An American film director, he was caught photographing the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley in 1944.  After the war he was blacklisted.


 * Allan Nunn May – A British citizen, he was one of the first Soviet spies uncovered during the cold war. He worked on the Manhattan Project and was betrayed by a Soviet defector in Canada. His was uncovered in 1946 and it led the United States to restrict the sharing of atomic secrets with Britain. On May 1, 1946, he was sentenced to ten years hard labour. He was released in 1952, after serving six and a half years.


 * Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – Americans who were involved in coordinating and recruiting an espionage network that included Ethel's brother, David Greenglass. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage, since the prosecution seemed to feel that there was not enough evidence to convict on espionage. Treason charges were not applicable, since the United States and the Soviet Union were allies at the time. The Rosenbergs denied all the charges but were convicted in a trial in which the prosecutor Roy Cohn said he was in daily secret contact with the judge, Irving Kaufman. Despite an international movement demanding clemency, and appeals to President Dwight D. Eisenhower by leading European intellectuals and the Pope, the Rosenbergs were executed at the height of the Korean War. President Eisenhower wrote to his son, serving in Korea, that if he spared Ethel (presumably for the sake of her children), then the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women.


 * Saville Sax – American acted as the courier for Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall.


 * Morton Sobell – American engineer tried and convicted along with the Rosenbergs, was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment but released from Alcatraz in 1969, after serving 17 years and 9 months. After proclaiming his innocence for over half a century, Sobell admitted spying for the Soviets, and implicated Julius Rosenberg, in an interview with the New York Times published on September 11, 2008.