Klaus Fuchs: The Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb

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In the spring of 1942 the war in Russia was nearing the end of its first year. The savage Russian resistance and the equally savage Russian winter had dashed Hitler’s hopes of a quick blitzkrieg victory over the Soviet Union to follow those in the West, and littered the landscape with the frozen wrecks of thousands of German tanks, trucks and artillery pieces, and the frozen bodies of tens of thousands of German soldiers. The invaders were being pushed back from the approaches to Moscow, and war was raging along a 4,500-mile front. Now Soviet armies were girding themselves to meet the next German offensive, and the Soviet Government was mobilizing industry and population for a prolonged and bitter struggle that would tax the nation’s resources to the utmost.

One day in April, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, called the Minister for the Chemical Industry, Mikhail Pervukhin, into his office. He handed Pervukhin a file containing intelligence reports of work that was going on in secret in Western countries on a new kind of weapon, a uranium bomb, that would explode by releasing the energy locked inside the atom. Molotov said he was giving him this file on the instructions of Stalin himself. He told Pervukhin to consult scientists knowledgeable in this field, and determine what action, if any, should be taken in the light of these reports.

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