At this point Sir Hartley Shawcross rose with an interjection. ‘My Lord, I think I ought to make it abundantly clear that there is no kind of suggestion that the Russians are enemies or potential enemies,’ he said. ‘The court has already decided that the offence consists in the communication of information to unauthorized persons — it might be to Your Lordship, it might be to me, it might be to anyone.’
Gardiner also referred to a statement that Winston Churchill had made in Parliament at one point during the war that Britain was giving Russia any technical information that could be of use in the war effort. Rightly or wrongly, he said, Nunn May felt indignant that this promise was not being kept.
Nunn May was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. A lot of people said the sentence was harsh in the circumstances. After all, he had given the information to the Russians, not to the other side. The Association of Scientific Workers asked for a reduction in the sentence. A delegation led by Harold Laski, the Chairman of the Labour Party and its principal political philosopher, called at the Home Office, also to ask for the sentence to be reduced.
There was another, lesser breach of security regulations in favour of an ally which has never been reported. At Los Alamos Edward Teller, pursuing work on a ‘super’, a hydrogen bomb, joined Egon Bretscher to make some calculations into deuterium — tritium reactions, which would be relevant to this. Bretscher decided that since he was there with the British group of scientists, Britain was entitled to have the results of this work, although he knew that it would be classified secret by the Los Alamos laboratory. Fuchs was going to return to England in early June, a little before the Bretschers, and he would travel by way of Washington. So Bretscher gave him a paper containing his calculations and asked him if he would take it to James Chadwick, who was still in Washington.
The day he was to go, Hannah Bretscher was out shopping and she noticed that security guards at the gate were searching every car that was leaving. The reason — although she did not appreciate this at the time — was that items of equipment had been disappearing from the laboratories. She reported this to her husband, and he suggested that she should warn Fuchs that he might be searched as he left. So she went over to Fuchs’s room in the big house and told him. Fuchs shrugged off his anxieties. ‘It’s quite all right. I’m used to carrying secret reports,’ he told her. The next moment he seemed flustered and, as if searching for something to say, he suddenly offered her a drink, although it was the early afternoon and not a normal drinking time.
Fuchs drove out of the gate without any trouble. He was accompanied by A. P. French, an American scientist who was remaining at Los Alamos; Fuchs had sold him his car on condition that he could drive it to Albuquerque Airport and hand it over there. He flew to Washington and met Chadwick, and then went to Cambridge for one more visit to the Heinemans. After this he was going to Schenectady to see Hans Bethe; he took his sister along to give her a break from the children and, since she said she had never flown before, they went by plane. (As always, he was meticulous, in submitting his expense accounts, in subtracting any extra cost involved in the side trips to Cambridge and Schenectady, since these were made for personal reasons.) Then he went on to the Montreal laboratory.
He was going to return to England by sea, but while he was with the Heinemans in Cambridge he received a cable from Cockcroft. The promised establishment was already set up, at Harwell, and it had been decided that Fuchs would be the head of the Theoretical Physics Division, one of seven division heads. Cockcroft asked him in his cable to attend a meeting of the Steering Committee on 1 July. So Fuchs flew back from Montreal in an RAF transport plane on 27 June.
He attended the Steering Committee meeting, but did not take up his post immediately. First he went to Germany where, as well as meeting some German scientists, he had a brief reunion with his father. They had not seen each other since the young Klaus Fuchs left Kiel for Berlin in that terrible spring of 1933.
Chapter Four
Fuchs took up his post at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, on 1 August 1946, seven months after the Ministry of Supply formally took possession of the site. It was on the green, windswept Berkshire[11] downs, fifty-five miles from London and eighteen miles from Oxford. It had been an RAF airfield during the war, and glider squadrons took off from there to take part in the D-Day landings. It was, and is today, one and a half miles long and a mile wide, surrounded by a wire fence and heavily policed, although most of the residential and recreational area is outside the fence. Fuchs came with the civil service grade of principal scientific officer, at a salary of £950 a year, a comfortable salary in those days, particularly for a single man.
The years at Harwell completed the transformation of Fuchs from an outsider into a member of the society in which he lived. He was no longer alienated from his surroundings. Now he had friends and not just working colleagues, a homeland and not just a country of asylum, a career and not just a job. If he was lonely now, it was because of what he was doing rather than what he was. It was the loneliness of the spy, not of the outsider. His role as a secret informant of the Soviet Union was a left-over from his earlier life, and towards the end of his time at Harwell, he was starting to abandon it.
He was among old colleagues and friends. Some of these were there when he arrived, others came soon after him. Otto Frisch came as head of the Nuclear Physics Division; a keen pianist, Frisch tried to persuade Fuchs to play the violin with him, but Fuchs protested that he was out of practice. Egon Bretscher also came from Los Alamos; he would replace Frisch as division head when Frisch moved to Cambridge University. There were seven people from Los Alamos at Harwell.
Another old acquaintance filled in as head of the Theoretical Physics Division until Fuchs arrived, and served as his deputy afterwards. This was Oscar Buneman, who had been in the internment camp in Canada with him. He and Buneman were among the small minority of German refugees in the camp who were not Jewish. Buneman, who was to become a good friend of Fuchs at Harwell, had distributed anti-Nazi leaflets as a student in Hamburg during the early years of the Hitler regime, and spent a year in prison as a result; after this, at the urging of his anxious parents, he went to Manchester University to continue his studies and he remained in Britain. During the war, he worked on the electromagnetic separation of uranium at the Berkeley, California, branch of the atomic bomb project, and then in the Montreal laboratory. Herbert Skinner also came back from Berkeley, to be the head of the General Physics Division (there was some arbitrariness in the distinctions drawn between the work of the different divisions) and later deputy to Cockcroft. He and Fuchs had known each other slightly at Bristol University before the war. Skinner and his wife Erna were to become Fuchs’s closest friends at Harwell.
A lot of people wanted to work at Harwell. The new field of atomic energy seemed to have almost unlimited possibilities. Scientists here would have greater resources for research than any university or industrial laboratory could command. The pay was at civil service rates, slightly higher than academic salaries. Scientists, and particularly those who had worked on the atomic bomb, were attracted also by the prospect of developing atomic energy to help mankind; it seemed to be the fulfilment of the alchemist’s dream of turning base metal into something of incalculable value. Margaret Gowing, the official historian of the British atomic energy programme, wrote of those early days at Harwelclass="underline"