Klaus Fuchs Convicted: Atomic Secrets to Soviets
Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, confessed on January 24, 1950, to passing atomic bomb designs to Soviet intelligence agents between 1941 and 1949. A British court convicted him on March 1, 1950, and sentenced him to fourteen years in prison, the maximum for espionage committed on behalf of a wartime ally. Fuchs had provided the Soviets with detailed specifications for the plutonium implosion bomb, enabling them to test their first nuclear weapon in August 1949, years ahead of Western estimates. His confession triggered a chain of investigations that led to the identification of his American courier, Harry Gold, who in turn implicated David Greenglass, whose testimony sent his sister Ethel Rosenberg and her husband Julius to the electric chair. Fuchs served nine years, was released, and emigrated to East Germany, where he became deputy director of a nuclear research institute.
March 1, 1950
76 years ago
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