During World War II, an American Air Force officer stationed in Britain somehow picked up a sketchy idea of a secret weapon programme that seems to have been the atomic bomb project. He thought, wrongly, that this was an American project from which Britain was excluded, and about which the British Government knew nothing. He evidently brooded on the morality of this, and then decided to act. By pulling strings, he got an appointment with the Chief of the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir John Portal. He told Portal that since arriving in Britain, he had been very impressed by the suffering that the British people had endured in the war and the fortitude with which they had borne this. Then he said that his government, the American Government, was engaged on a programme to build an important new weapon and was keeping this secret from Britain, its ally. He thought this was wrong, and he wanted -
At this point, Portal stood up and said, ‘Get out of this office at once! If you say another word, I’ll call your superior officer and have you arrested and court martialled.’[23]
Clearly, Portal was right. Certainly his was a military man’s natural reaction. The American officer had no right to disobey orders and take it upon himself to reverse his government’s actions. He was being disloyal to his government and his oath of loyalty as an officer. But many people would at least sympathize with his motives. Even Portal did, to the extent of sparing him arrest and court martial.
Certainly Emil Fuchs saw it that way. Some time after his son was sent to prison, he told the writer Robert Jungk that he had ‘the highest respect’ for his son’s decision to do what he did, and he went on: ‘He was justly condemned under British law. But there must always be from time to time people who deliberately assume such guilt as his… They have to take the consequences of their resolute affirmation that they see a position more clearly than those who have the power, at that juncture, to deal with it. Should it not be clear by this time that my son acted with more accurate foresight in the interests of the British people than did their government?’[24]
Fuchs broke promises that he had given freely, his promise of secrecy when he joined the atomic bomb project and his oath of allegiance to the British Crown, and betrayed a trust that others had placed in him. This is treachery. This kind of betrayal corrodes the bonds that bind people to one another, and pollutes the social environment with mistrust.
Yet most of us, like Emil Fuchs, place a high value on individual morality, and the right of each person to work out for himself what is right and wrong. This is one of the great achievements of Western humanism. Because we do, we take a chance that someone will decide, as Fuchs did, that any degree of betrayal is justified in this or that higher cause. The risk of a Klaus Fuchs every now and again is a price we pay for individualism.
After the defection to Moscow of another Harwell scientist, Bruno Pontecorvo, and the trial and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy examined all the cases of which came to be called atomic espionage. Their report, in April 1951, rated Fuchs by far the most important, and said: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Klaus Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy, not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of nations.’ The report also said: ‘If the United States had known early in World War II what Russia had learned by 1945 through espionage, it would have saved eighteen months.’
Others have come to a similar conclusion. Rudolf Peierls was at an international physics conference once and was chatting with a Russian physicist who had worked on the Soviet atomic bomb. He asked him how much difference Fuchs’s information had made. The man said he would like to consult a couple of his colleagues before answering. Then he came back and said they decided it had saved Russia between one and two years.
One cannot say how much if at all the world changed because Russia acquired the atomic bomb sooner than it would have otherwise. A Federal judge in New York City, Judge Irving Saypol, sentenced the Rosenbergs to death because, he said, North Korea would not have started the Korean War if Russia did not have the atomic bomb, and so the Rosenbergs were partly responsible for the deaths of the Americans who were killed in Korea. This is certainly possible, but it is speculation.[25]
Certainly if Russia’s acquisition of the atomic bomb was linked to the outbreak of the Korean War, then Fuchs was the person in the West who was principally responsible.
There was one more blow in store for Fuchs. In December 1950 the British Deprivation of Citizenship Committee said it proposed to take away his citizenship. Under the British Nationality Act 1948, Section 10, Subsection A, a person having been naturalized can be deprived of his citizenship ‘if he has shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards His Majesty’. Before this can be done, a hearing must be held, and the person has the right to speak. The final decision rests with the Home Secretary.
Sir Hartley Shawcross gave evidence before the committee, and said that the only consideration in the question was ‘whether it is in the public interest that Fuchs should continue as a British subject’.
Fuchs did not avail himself of his right to appear before the committee, but he wrote a letter arguing that his citizenship should not be taken away, and this was read out.
He wrote:
If this was intended as punishment for my actions, there would be little that I could say except that I have already received the maximum sentence permissible by law. However, section 20 of the British Nationality Act 1948, to which you refer, appears to exclude the intention of punishment. I assume, therefore, that the question under consideration is my present and future loyalty.
Lest silence on my part should be interpreted as an indication that even now I do not appreciate the values and obligations of citizenship of this country, I wish to submit the following representations to the Secretary of State.[26]
I cannot expect the Secretary of State to accept an assurance of loyalty from me. However, I wish to submit that — in order to determine the matter in a judicial manner — the Secretary of State should obtain the opinion of those Government departments which have been concerned with my case, that is, M15 and the Director of Public Prosecutions.
My disloyal actions ceased early in 1949 before any suspicion had been voiced against me. I had received no relevant promise and no substantial threat. I was not forced to confess by any evidence.
I think the facts mentioned would have been of great value in a plea in mitigation. I have loyally co-operated with MI5 and the FBI although no threat or promise has been made to me at any time before or after my trial.
I submit that these facts show that in making my confession and in my subsequent actions, I was guided by my convictions and loyalties, and that they show clearly where my loyalties are.
Despite this plea, the Committee recommended that his citizenship be taken away from him, and this was done. Fuchs thought he had found a home, and now he was expelled.
Skardon still used to visit him in prison; M15 wanted to keep in touch with him in case new questions arose which he might be able to answer. But now Fuchs told Skardon that their friendship, as he called it, was ended. ‘If you were a policeman and I was arrested for burglary,’ he said to him, ‘and I came clean and gave you all the help I could, I would expect you to do all you could to help me.’ Skardon protested that he could not have stopped the committee taking away his British nationality, but Fuchs told him he did not want to see him any more.
23
Portal, as Viscount Portal of Hungerford, became head of the atomic energy programme after the war; he told this story to another official of the programme after Fuchs was sent to prison, and this official told it to me. — NM
25
It is a plausible supposition. The Hungarian General Bela Kiraly, who commanded a Soviet Bloc army before he fled to the West after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, told an interviewer that Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb allowed Russia to give North Korea the go-ahead to invade. ‘It gave Stalin a kind of security that the Soviet Union was no longer a target which could not reciprocate in kind,’ he said. See Michael Charlton,