Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009
He Changed History
By Jeremy Bernstein
The physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe once remarked that Klaus Fuchs was one of the few people who actually changed the course of human history. The German-born Fuchs was part of the British delegation at Los Alamos during World War II, and he worked with Bethe, who had himself emigrated from Germany, via England, to the United States in the 1930s. Fuchs was spying for the Soviet Union and managed to transmit to the Russians detailed plans for the plutonium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. On August 29, 1949, the Russians successfully tested an exact copy of that weapon. Fuchs's information had saved them many years of work.[*]
Feature, 1126 words
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