The other incident was recalled by the Irish playwright Brendan Behan. He came to England at the age of sixteen, during World War II, to plant bombs for the IRA. He was arrested soon after his arrival and sent to a Borstal, a kind of prison for juvenile offenders. While he was there he fell ill, and was taken to hospital. He found himself in a ward in which all the other twenty-five patients were soldiers. He was there on Christmas Day, and some women from a local community organization came round with Christmas dinners for all the soldiers. With tight wartime rationing in force, this must have meant considerable sacrifice for the donors. When these were distributed, one of the soldiers suddenly said, ‘What about Paddy here? What about his Christmas dinner?’ It was explained that this organization provided dinners only for soldiers. All twenty-five then announced that they would not eat their Christmas dinners unless young Behan was given one also. There was none provided for him, so a compromise was reached: they all took a small amount of their own turkey and Christmas pudding and gave it to him.[16]
Fuchs recognized this characteristic of British life, and there was a strain of decency in him that responded to it. In a revealing passage in his confession, he wrote: ‘Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contact were left-wing, and affected, to some degree or other, by the same kind of philosophy. Since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many a deep-rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. I do not know where this springs from and I don’t think they do, but it is there.’
He had grasped hold of something, but he did not know what it was. He saw that this kind of behaviour was rooted deeply, but he could not understand how, because it was not rooted in a set of precepts, such as his Marxism, or his father’s Christianity. He could understand ideology; he had difficulty with feelings.
One friend gave an account of the part of the British character that both attracted Fuchs and eluded his understanding when he was talking on a radio programme about him: ‘When he started working with us, he got to know people, and he got to know their way of life. He acquired respect for the principles by which people live here. They are never really explained. We don’t talk much about what we believe in, and what is decent, and what one should or shouldn’t do. You just have to find out, by watching people behave. Then you find that certain things are just not done.’ The fact that this was said in a Central European accent makes it not less telling, but more so.
It was not only the existence of this decent way of behaving that Fuchs had to recognize, but its strength. In the Germany of his youth, simple decency, as represented by the Social Democrats, seemed to be ineffectual against the brutality of the Nazis unless it was accompanied by the iron discipline of the Communist Party. But Britain had been locked in struggle with Nazi Germany for five and a half years, and had fought on when others caved in, and had prevailed.
The barrier that separated the two compartments in Fuchs’s mind was breaking down. Feelings were washing over into the part reserved for strict logic.
Now he began to go through mental agonies brought on by moral doubts. His was not the struggle of the true believer battling against the temptations of sin, but the struggle to find out what to believe in and what to regard as sinful. It was the agony of generations of Protestants striving in their own mind to distinguish truth from error, to find their way through a sea of doubt and uncertainty without the pole star provided by Catholic doctrine. Fuchs had cast aside man-made laws. He took the rightness of the Communist cause as his guiding star. Was this to prove a false one? Was he, morally, off course?
He also realized now that in giving away secrets, he was not only betraying the British and American governments, but he was also betraying Harwell and his friends there. At the same time as he doubted the rightness of what he was doing, he was coming to appreciate the high cost of doing it. He described in his confession his state of mind at this time:
I had to face the fact that it had been possible for me in one half of my mind to be friendly with people, be close friends and at the same time to deceive them and endanger them. I had to realize that the control mechanism warned me of danger to myself, but that it had also prevented me from realizing what I was doing to people who were close to me. I then realized that the combination of the three ideas which had made me what I was, were wrong, in fact that every single one of them was wrong, that there are certain standards of moral behaviour which are in you and that you cannot disregard. That in your actions you must be clear in your own mind whether they are right or wrong. That you must be able, before accepting somebody else’s authority, to state your doubts and try to resolve them; and I found that at least I myself was made by circumstances.
This was spoken from the heart, and from pain, and, as one would expect, it was muddled. It is difficult to fathom from it just what errors or sins Fuchs was taking upon himself. It was not clear whether he was saying that his political logic was wrong, or that it was wrong to follow that political logic as far as he did; whether — to bring this down to specifics — he was wrong to believe in Communism, or only wrong to spy for it. It is not clear whether he felt it was wrong to betray his adopted country, or only wrong to betray his friends.
One can try to trace in the tangle the outlines of the three ideas he thought were wrong. He seems to be saying that one should pay attention to moral intuition — ‘certain standards of moral behaviour which are in you and that you cannot disregard’. This is a concept for which there was no room in the strict political logic which had guided his actions up to that point. He also seems to be saying that he had accepted the Communist doctrine too uncritically, that he was not sufficiently sure of it now to act upon it: ‘That in your actions you must be clear in your own mind whether they are right or wrong. That you must be able… to state your doubts and try to resolve them.’ Finally, he seems to have been repudiating what he said was his earlier conviction that he had become a ‘free man independent of the surrounding forces of society’, and to have swung over to the other, self-denying extreme of saying that he was ‘made by circumstances’.
When he recounted the anxieties he felt during this period he dwelt on questions of loyalty and betrayal, but he did not talk about what is central to most people’s concerns when they think about Fuchs and his work: the terrible power of the atomic bomb, which, in so far as he was able, he was disposing of as he thought was right.
Yet he thought about it, and this was the only thing he wrote down at the time and kept. Long afterwards, there was found among the papers in his office, with mathematical calculations, a sheet of paper containing three statements, in his handwriting: ‘Twenty kilotons[17] killed 100,000. One megaton would kill five million. — Megatons [the person who found the paper does not remember the figure] would kill the entire world population.’
The next time Fuchs had an appointment to meet his Soviet contact in a London pub, he fell ill with one of his dry, racking coughs and he could not go. This was not the first time. If this cough was really a price extracted by his unconscious for his betrayal, then the unconscious opposition was escalating its actions. It was moving from demonstration to rebellion, from protest to prevention.
By the time of his next appointment after that, the opposition was no longer unconscious. Because of all the doubts he had, he decided not to keep the appointment. This was a negative decision rather than a positive one. He had not yet made up his mind finally to end his espionage activities. But it seems likely that if things had been allowed to run their normal course, he would have stopped passing information to the Russians. Then no one would know that he had ever done so. He would be living in honoured retirement in England today, probably having spent the last years of his career occupying a university chair, as Cockcroft had predicted, and the recipient of a CBE.
17
This was what the original announcement of the Hiroshima bomb said was its power. Subsequent analysis showed it to be about thirteen kilotons.