A spur to everyone’s efforts in this area was the fear that German physicists might be working along the same lines, and might be first with a super-bomb. Many leading nuclear physicists were German, and some of them were still in Germany. The German victories of 1940, which left Britain alone and vulnerable, and the German air attacks which were to be a prelude to invasion, gave an even greater sense of urgency to every kind of war work. If the prospect of Nazi occupation was still unimaginable to most British people, it was all too real to people who had come from countries where the Nazis now ruled, and, if they were Jewish, it was particularly threatening.
The Peierls took the painful step of sending their young son and daughter to Canada for safety, taking advantage of a scheme devised for university faculty families. Peierls had been struck particularly by the sight of Home Guard units drilling with shotguns, and he envisioned them confronting Panzer divisions. (He was willing to face the danger himself. Early in 1939 his friend Hans Bethe had written from America suggesting that he might like to come and work there. He wrote back saying that it looked as if the Chamberlain Government would continue its appeasement policy indefinitely, and this would mean that democracy in Europe was beaten, in which case he would like to come to America; if, however, Britain resisted and there was a war, he would remain and play what part he could.) Peierls became an auxiliary fireman as well as a physicist, spending nights fighting fires started by German bombs, for Birmingham, as a major industrial centre, was a target for the Luftwaffe when the air raids on Britain started. Mrs Peierls became an auxiliary nurse at a local hospital; later she switched jobs and became a fitter in a GEC plant making aircraft components.
In early 1941 Peierls decided that he needed an assistant. He remembered his brief meetings with Klaus Fuchs, and remembered also some of Fuchs’s papers that he had read and discussed with him. These papers showed mathematical skill, and also flexibility, and this was a quality he thought would be needed on this project, since they were going into unexplored territory and there was no way of knowing what problems they would encounter. Fuchs had not done any work on atomic fission but that was not important; it was talent, not expertise, that was wanted.
Peierls asked the Ministry of Aircraft Production whether he might recruit Fuchs. The Ministry asked MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence service, whether anything untoward was known about Fuchs. MI5 had two items about him in their files. One was the 1934 report from the German consul in Bristol that he was a Communist, but this was from a tainted source. The other was more recent: a report from an informant in the German refugee community saying that, he was known to be a Communist. This was not without significance. At this time the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was in operation and the British Communist Party, following the Soviet line, argued for peace with Germany. Communists were suspected of sabotaging the war effort and the party newspaper, the Daily Worker, was banned under wartime emergency regulations.
The report on Fuchs may have had some influence, but it was not much. Perhaps because of it, a Ministry official replied to Peierls saying he could hire Fuchs, provided he told him only what he needed to know for the problem he was working on. Peierls wrote back saying that he could not work that way, that if he had an assistant he would have to take him fully into the picture. The Ministry official dropped the condition and told him to go ahead.
Peierls wrote to Fuchs in Edinburgh offering him the job. He gave no indication of what the work was, but told him that it could be important to the war effort. The salary was £275 a year, probably as much as he was earning in Edinburgh; it was to rise to £400 in the next two years.
Fuchs accepted Peierls’s offer. He said later that he had no idea what the work involved, but if he had known it would not have made any difference. He wrote a letter of acceptance, and in May 1941 he packed his belongings and took a train south through blacked-out Britain to Birmingham, to join the mainstream of twentieth-century history.
Chapter Two
Housing was short in wartime Birmingham, and the Peierls invited Fuchs to move in with them when he came down from Edinburgh, in their large house in Culthorpe Road, in the Edgbaston district. He accepted, taking the room that Otto Frisch had vacated a few months earlier.
Rudolf and Eugenia Peierls (now Sir Rudolf and Lady Peierls) are a contrasting couple. He is quiet and self-effacing, modest about his achievements, usually willing to yield the floor in a conversation. She is warm, outgoing and exuberant, speaking volubly in a heavy Russian accent that she has never lost, although she left Russia in 1931.
Their courtship had the romance of exotic locations and love overcoming obstacles. They met in Odessa on the Black Sea when he, a twenty-three-year-old German physicist at the University of Zürich, was attending a conference on physics there. She had recently graduated in physics at Leningrad University, and had gone to the conference at her own expense out of interest. They both spoke English, and this was the only language they had in common. They talked together for ten days, and when he went back to Zürich and she to her home in Leningrad, they corresponded, in English. He visited her in Leningrad and proposed, and they were married there. Then he returned to Zürich, and they had to wait six months before the Soviet authorities would allow her to leave and join him.
In 1932 Peierls was in the happy position of being able to divide his time between Fermi’s laboratory in Rome and the Rutherford Laboratory at Cambridge University, thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation grant given for this purpose. He was offered an attractive university post in Hamburg, and he accepted. Then Franz von Papen became Chancellor of Germany, and the Peierls foresaw a rapid slide downwards leading to Hitler; they are both Jewish. He changed his mind about the Hamburg post and accepted an offer from Manchester University, joining those central Europeans whose lives were determined by political events.
Fuchs was an easy person to live with. He gave his ration books to the Peierls and ate his meals with them. He used to help with the dishes after supper, and usually spent the rest of the evening in his room, which he always kept tidy. He was then twenty-nine, an excessively quiet, thin man of medium height, wearing glasses, with plain features and a prominent Adam’s apple: he had long, strong fingers that could belong to a pianist, that often held a cigarette.
Eugenia Peierls is very gregarious, so that despite their extra war work as fireman and nurse the couple often had people in the house. Fuchs was always present but stayed in the background, and usually spoke only when spoken to. A frequent guest was a Russian emigre who was a specialist in linguistics at the university; they often discussed Russia and Russian literature, but Fuchs rarely joined in these conversations.
Explaining his reticence to others, Mrs Peierls coined a phrase that both she and her husband were to use about Fuchs many times. ‘He’s a penny-in-the-slot person,’ she said. ‘Put a question in and you get an answer out. But if you don’t put anything in, you don’t get anything out.’ By now, Fuchs was relaxed enough so that she could tease him about this, and he would grin sheepishly.
Mrs Peierls never felt his silences discomfiting. ‘There are some people,’ she explained to a friend, ‘who don’t say much and you feel it’s because they’re shy, that they want to speak but are afraid to. This makes me uncomfortable. I never feel that with Klaus.’
He told the Peierls about his internment camp in Canada, and said he resented being lumped together with Nazis. He talked a little about university days in Germany, and his activities with the student Socialists. He never said that he was a Communist, although Peierls would not have been deterred from hiring him, and would not have thought less of him, if he had. People talked politics and talked about the war. Fuchs rarely expressed political opinions; he left a vague impression that he was a democratic Socialist and blended in, as he had in Bristol, with the moderate left-wing background.