A spy but also a scientist. How peculiar.
Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (December 29, 1911 – January 28, 1988) was a German-born theoretical physicist and atomic spy who was convicted of surreptitiously supplying information on the British and American atomic bomb research to the USSR during, and shortly after, World War II. Fuchs was highly technically competent, being responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first fission weapons and early models of the hydrogen bomb while a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In late 1943 Fuchs transferred along with Peierls to Columbia University, New York City to work on the Manhattan Project. Although Fuchs was an asset of GRU in Britain, his control was transferred to the NKGB when he moved to New York. From August 1944 Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos, New Mexico under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium bomb, and was at one point given calculation work that Edward Teller had refused to do due to lack of interest. He was the author of techniques (such as the still-used Fuchs-Nordheim method) for calculating the energy of a fissile assembly which goes highly prompt-critical. Later, he also filed a patent with John Von Neumann, describing a method to initiate fusion in a thermonuclear weapon with an implosion trigger. He was one of the many Los Alamos scientists present at the Trinity test. While at Los Alamos, Fuchs loaned his automobile on a number of occasions to Richard Feynman, who used the vehicle to visit his dying first wife in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Hans Bethe once said that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist he knew who truly changed history. Because of the manner in which the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenty Beria, used foreign intelligence (as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default) it is unknown whether Fuchs' fission information had a substantial impact (and considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium they could procure, it is hard for scholars to accurately judge how much time this saved the Soviets). Some former Soviet scientists said they were actually hampered by Fuchs' data, because Beria insisted that their first bomb ("Joe 1") should resemble the American plutonium bomb ("Fat Man") as much as possible, even though the scientists had discovered a number of improvements and different designs for a more efficient weapon.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
In late 1943 Fuchs transferred along with Peierls to Columbia University, New York City to work on the Manhattan Project. Although Fuchs was an asset of GRU in Britain, his control was transferred to the NKGB when he moved to New York. From August 1944 Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos, New Mexico under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium bomb, and was at one point given calculation work that Edward Teller had refused to do due to lack of interest. He was the author of techniques (such as the still-used Fuchs-Nordheim method) for calculating the energy of a fissile assembly which goes highly prompt-critical. Later, he also filed a patent with John Von Neumann, describing a method to initiate fusion in a thermonuclear weapon with an implosion trigger. He was one of the many Los Alamos scientists present at the Trinity test. While at Los Alamos, Fuchs loaned his automobile on a number of occasions to Richard Feynman, who used the vehicle to visit his dying first wife in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Hans Bethe once said that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist he knew who truly changed history. Because of the manner in which the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenty Beria, used foreign intelligence (as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default) it is unknown whether Fuchs' fission information had a substantial impact (and considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium they could procure, it is hard for scholars to accurately judge how much time this saved the Soviets). Some former Soviet scientists said they were actually hampered by Fuchs' data, because Beria insisted that their first bomb ("Joe 1") should resemble the American plutonium bomb ("Fat Man") as much as possible, even though the scientists had discovered a number of improvements and different designs for a more efficient weapon.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
posted by Tristan Tzara at 9:35 AM
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