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Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall & the Secrets That Left Los Alamos
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Manhattan Project was history's most guarded secret — yet the Soviets knew how to build the bomb before it ever dropped. Meet the spies inside Los Alamos: Fuchs, Hall, and Greenglass, and understand why they chose to betray it.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's something worth sitting with. The Manhattan Project was the most tightly guarded secret in American history.
By nineteen forty-three, Los Alamos sat on forty-six thousand acres of New Mexico high desert. General Leslie Groves had selected the site precisely because it was nowhere.
Klaus Fuchs arrived at Los Alamos in August of nineteen forty-four. He was a theoretical physicist.
Theodore Hall was nineteen years old when he arrived at Los Alamos. He was, at that point, one of the youngest scientists on the project, a Harvard physicist who'd graduated at eighteen.
David Greenglass was not a physicist. He was a machinist.
The question that matters is what this espionage actually changed. The Soviets detonated their first atomic device in August of nineteen forty-nine.
Here's the part that doesn't fit neatly. Fuchs, Hall, and Greenglass were not mercenaries.
Security at Los Alamos had been rigorous. Compartmentalization was the dominant principle.
The men and women who worked at Los Alamos mostly went home after the war and built ordinary lives. Some stayed in physics.
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