Atomic spies



"Atomic spies" or "Atom spies" were 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 U.S. government.

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. Additionally, 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. Scientists from the Soviet Union were later recognized for their contributions to the understanding of a nuclear reality, and were awarded several Nobel Prizes. Igor Kurchatov, L. D. Landau, Kirill Sinelnikov, were among those Soviet Scientists that helped establish, and prove the existence of a splittable atom. Dwarfed by, and lost upon the scale of the Manhattan Project, the significance of the contributions are rarely understood, and credited, outside of the field of physics. According to several sources, it was understood on a theoretical level that the atom provided for extremely powerful and novel releases of energy, and could possibly be utilized in the future for military purposes. In recorded comments made by the physicists themselves, they lamented over their inability to achieve any kind of practical application from the discoveries. This would show that the scientists thought the creation of an atomic weapon was a pipe-dream, and untenable. Although they could conceivably have been first to generate a man-made fission reaction, in reality they lacked the ambition, the funding, the engineering capability, the leadership, and ultimately, the capability to do so. The undertaking would be of an unimaginable scale, and the resources required to engineer for such use as a nuclear bomb, and nuclear power were deemed too great to pursue.

The United States, in collaboration with the British and Canada, correctly recognized the significance of an atomic bomb at the urging of Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, and immediately embarked upon a race to acquire a usable device. During the quest to create the atomic bomb it is estimated that $2 billion, eighty-six thousand tons of silver, and twenty-four thousand skilled workers drove 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 state of a fledgling Soviet program was quite different, and the 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 sufficiently enriched uranium and plutonium were beyond the scope and efforts of the team. The knowledge of techniques and strategies that were being employed in the Allied programs that the Soviet Union procured intelligence on by means of espionage might have played a role in the rapid development of the Soviet bomb after the war.

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, and consumed vast amount of 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 materials such as graphite to successfully purify the U-235 isotope. The quantities required for the development were also beyond the scope and purview of the Soviet program.

The Soviet Union did not even have natural uranium ore mines at the start of the nuclear arms race. A lack of materials made it very difficult to conduct novel research, and map out a clear pathway to achieving the fuel they needed. Efforts to produce Uranium fuel dirt cheap only frustrated Soviet efforts, and they found their industrial techniques for refinement lacking. The problem was eventually rectified through the use of information stolen from the Manhattan Project. Without such, the problems the Soviet atomic team experienced would have taken many, many years to correct, affecting the end date of a Soviet atomic weapon significantly.

The missing link 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 secondly, could 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 Soviet 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 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 under-manned and under-supplied 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. But a basic understanding of the usefulness of an atomic weapon, the sheer resources, and the talent weren't present until much, much later. 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. During the Cold War trials it was touted as one of the most significant intelligence coups in the history of man.

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.