Sentencing of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs: 1 March 1950 Posted on: 2 March 2020 Seventy years ago, Klaus Fuchs was sentenced in the Crown Court to 14 years for passing classified information to the Soviet Union. Born in Germany, Fuchs had fled the Nazis to Britain in 1933. A brilliant scientist, he became a naturalised British citizen and received security clearance to work from 1941 on the British atomic project Klaus Fuchs (The National Archives) codenamed TUBE ALLOYS. From 1943 he worked in the US on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb, and from 1947 at the British nuclear establishment at Harwell. Fuchs was identified as a traitor in signals traffic intercepted under the US VENONA programme, and arrested in February 1950, after a series of interviews with MI5. It was not just an embarrassment to British intelligence but sent shock waves through AngloAmerican atomic co-operation, already strained by US reluctance to share nuclear knowhow.1 The fundamentals of the Anglo-American relationship remained solid, including on security and intelligence matters. However Fuchs’ arrest and conviction came at a time when the Truman Administration and Attlee’s Labour government diverged on some areas of foreign policy. This was particularly marked in respect of Communist China, where British recognition of the People’s Republic in January 1950 angered a US administration that had not abandoned support for the Nationalists in Formosa (Taiwan). In general, US policy in the Asia Pacific region was a work in progress in early 1950. However there was a general unwillingness to do anything that might smack of supporting Western colonialism (such as British policy in the Middle East, or the Dutch and French in Indonesia). The shock of the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and the spread of Communism in South East Asia was to crystallise US policy in the region. But at the time of Fuchs’ arrest, when Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had just returned from the Colombo Conference, Bevin’s argument that a ‘Marshall Plan of the East’ was essential to underpin Western security found little resonance in Washington. European integration Kissinger’s ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ may be apocryphal. But in 1950 the United States, promoting free trade and convertible currencies, certainly preferred a European bloc, including Britain, to a collection of awkward independent countries.
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