The First War of Physics (74 page)

17. German émigré physicist Klaus Fuchs joined in the work of the MAUD Committee in May 1941. He became a Soviet spy towards the end of that year. Fuchs was part of the British Tube Alloys delegation and joined the Manhattan Project in December 1943 to work on gaseous diffusion. He relocated to Los Alamos in August 1944. This picture is the photograph from Fuchs’ Los Alamos staff badge. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

18. American physicist Theodore Hall was just nineteen years old when he was recruited by Los Alamos talentspotters in January 1944. He became a Soviet spy in October of that year, passing secrets initially with the help of his student friend Saville Sax. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

19. David Greenglass worked as a machinist in X Division, part of a Special Engineering Detachment assigned to Los Alamos in August 1944. He was recruited as a Soviet spy by his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, in November. (US National Archives and Record Administration)

20. Soviet physicist Igor Kurchatov was appointed by the State Defence Committee to lead its atomic programme in February 1943. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Kurchatov had vowed not to shave his beard until the enemy was defeated. He was the principal scientific recipient of the espionage materials supplied by Fuchs, Hall and Greenglass. (VNIIEF Museum, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

21. The second Alsos mission followed Allied forces into Germany with the aim of tracking down German atomic physicists and materials. This ‘council of war’ in Hechingen features SIS operative Eric Welsh (back row, second from left), Charles Hambro (sitting, second from left), John Lansdale, head of security for the Manhattan Project (sitting, fourth from right), Michael Perrin, deputy director of Tube Alloys (sitting, third from right), and Boris Pash (sitting, extreme right). (Courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory)

22. The Alsos mission captured leading German physicists involved in atomic research, together with their experimental apparatus such as this spherical reactor. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Goudsmit Collection)

23. The last German experimental nuclear reactor, B-VIII, was reassembled in a cave laboratory in Haigerloch. The experiment failed. The reactor was discovered by the Alsos mission in April 1945. Michael Perrin realised that the reactor was too small to go critical. (AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Goudsmit Collection)

24. The first ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb was assembled for the Trinity test atop a 110-foot tower. The bomb consisted of about five kilos of plutonium, formed into a sphere about the size of a small orange. The plutonium core was surrounded by a uranium tamper and 32 explosive lenses. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

25. The Fat Man plutonium bomb exploded with a yield equivalent to 18,600 tons of TNT. Oppenheimer, wearing his trademark porkpie hat, and Groves inspect the twisted remains of the tower structure following the Trinity test explosion. (Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

26. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just one more catastrophe on top of a long list of utter catastrophes, one that brought the war to an end with such a powerful exclamation that it burned into the consciousness of all who lived then, and all who have lived since. This picture shows the mushroom cloud developing above the ruins of Nagasaki. (US National Archives)

27. British physicist and Soviet spy Alan Nunn May was exposed by the defection of cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa in September 1945. May was arrested on 4 March 1946. He was tried at the Old Bailey on 1 May and sentenced to ten years in prison. (Getty Images)