My Uncle, Klaus Fuchs - Beyond The Cold War

Klaus Fuchs after his release from prison

Early in the morning of July 16, 1945, before dawn crept over the horizon, a group of scientists stood at one of three observation points on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in the New Mexico desert and waited for the Trinity test to begin. The explosion came at 5:29 a.m., when a nuclear device, dubbed simply “The Gadget,” detonated and shot a mushroom cloud into the air. The sky turned purple, then green and finally white. Three weeks later, on August 6, the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, destroying half the city and killing an estimated 42,000 to 93,000 inhabitants (totaling more than 150,000 over a period of four months). A second bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9, leaving another 70,000 people dead. The Atomic Age had begun.

One of the scientists who witnessed that first nuclear detonation in the New Mexico desert was Klaus Fuchs, a young theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, the American-led nuclear weapons development program, from 1944 to 1946. A German-born, naturalized British citizen, Klaus had been active in the Communist Party while a student at Kiel University in Germany but fled in 1933 after the National Socialists (Nazis) burned the Parliament building, blamed it on the Communists, and turned Party members into hunted criminals.

Over a period of nearly ten years, starting even before he worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Klaus passed classified information to the Soviet Union through Russian agents: a woman in England code-named “Sonja” and a courier in the United States whom Klaus knew only as “Raymond.” Later, after the affair was uncovered, “Sonja” turned out to be an operative of the Soviet military intelligence service (GRU) named Ursula Kuczynski (also known as Ruth Werner), while “Raymond” was identified as a chemist named Harry Gold. Kuczynski was never captured, but Gold served 15 years of a 30-year sentence.

Klaus at age 14

Klaus evaded detection for three years after his return to England, where he resumed work on the British nuclear weapons program as well as civilian projects (and continued to pass secret information to the Russians). But after U.S. military intelligence agents decrypted Soviet cables in which Klaus's name appeared, he came under scrutiny and eventually confessed his activities. He was convicted of espionage in a trial that lasted only 90 minutes and sentenced to 14 years in prison, the maximum punishment at the time for passing classified information to a friendly government (after all, the Soviet Union was a U.S. and British ally during and after the war). You can read the statement he made to an MI5 agent here. He served nine years, with an early release in 1959 for good behavior.

Klaus Fuchs has been called many things. Traitor. Disloyal to friends and colleagues. Atom Spy. To me, he was always just Uncle Klaus, my mother’s older brother.

When I tell people I am related to a man often considered the most notorious spy of the Atomic Age, people inevitably want to know what my uncle revealed to me about his years passing secrets to the Russians. It’s a reasonable question. After all, as his niece, a person he trusted and who hadn’t even been a twinkle in her mother’s eye at the time all those events went down, wouldn’t he tell me things that weren’t part of the public record?

I hate to disappoint, but we never did talk about it much. And he didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already heard many times from my mother. Only that it was a decision he didn’t make lightly or without considering the consequences. That he deeply regretted deceiving his close friends, people who trusted him implicitly. That he didn’t think he had any choice in the matter, not without compromising his conscience. Which is why he returned the Soviets’ cash-filled envelopes without ever opening them.

It wasn't money or greed that drove Klaus to lead a double life of dedicated scientist and Soviet informant. He sincerely believed that Communism would pave the way for a better, new world, and he felt the Russians should know what their British and American allies were up to. More importantly, he thought that if the world’s two superpowers both had a nuclear bomb, neither was likely to use it – fear of mutually assured destruction would act as a deterrent to global annihilation.

Klaus and his sister, Christel
(my mother)

The truth is, I’ve always been much more interested in Uncle Klaus, the man, than in “Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy.” As a child, I occasionally traveled with my parents and sister to East Germany, where Klaus had settled right after his release from prison. During those visits, he always seemed a bit enigmatic to me, tall and silent, smiling and affectionate but never saying much. He left the conversation up to his wife, my Aunt Grete, the much chattier of the pair.

Years later, in the early 1980s, when I was a student at Leipzig University (or Karl-Marx Universität, as it was called at the time), I’d take the train to Dresden on weekends and wander up the pedestrian zone from the station to where Klaus and Grete lived on Alt Markt. On such trips, I’d pass the ruins of the Frauenkirche, an 18^th-century church that had been bombed in the war and left a pile of rubble as a monument, and wonder how my uncle could live so close to such an unavoidable reminder of war, its destructive power, and all he’d experienced. But I never did ask him that question.

Instead, I got him to talk about his life as a child with my mother and their two older siblings, Gerhard and Elisabeth, in Eisenach before the war. Perhaps I wanted corroboration of the stories my mother had told me all my life. Or I sought another perspective, the overlapping yet divergent memories of siblings growing up in the same time, place, and family.

I’d heard how Klaus taught my mother to read when she was just five, and he not yet seven. (He didn’t remember that.) How they’d climb the tree outside their house, with part of its trunk bent horizontally, and pretend it was a horse they’d ride across the countryside. (He remembered it being a camel.) How he’d kept white mice as pets and taught them tricks. (His version was that he built them running wheels and mazes to play in.) The one story he recalled just the way she’d told it to me was how he’d hide a pair of his trousers in a closet so she could put them on, sneak out the window and run off with him to climb trees without their mother being able to stop her daughter’s tomboy adventures and scold her for unladylike behavior.

Me on the "horse" tree in Eisenach

After I graduated from Leipzig University in 1983, I never saw my uncle again. He died five years later, in January 1988. His passing merited a few seconds on the six o’clock evening news, barely enough time for his picture to flash across my TV screen. It’s odd to see your uncle on the news, even for such a brief moment, but mainly I felt sad to witness his long life, spanning a period of 76 years, reduced to his most publicly sensational decade.

I understand the historic significance of his actions in passing classified information to the Soviets, and yet it annoys me that the spy story overshadows his other accomplishments: the fact that he was a brilliant scientist who made significant contributions to his field, qualities that got him assigned to the Manhattan Project in the first place. After all, Klaus’s work continued for two more decades after he moved to Dresden, where he became the deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in nearby Rossendorf, working on peaceful applications of nuclear technology and reactor safety, and devoted himself to promoting nuclear disarmament.

It makes perfect sense to me that Uncle Klaus, who always lived life according to the dictates of his conscience, ended up working for peace.