Fuchs's Security Policies, Questions And Answers

After his return to England, in 1941 Fuchs was invited by Rudolf Peierls, another German-born British physicist, to Birmingham to work on the British nuclear weapon project, codenamed Tube Alloys. While there were concerns regarding the security of hiring Fuchs, good scientists were in such short demand that Britain decided that Fuchs was worth the risk. He was cleared by MI5 and also by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research for this position. This decision was later criticized in Fuchs’s obituary on The Times, which stated that “there appears to have been no curiosity about his past or political leanings when he was later assigned to atomic research which carried a high security classification.” Fuchs’s espionage career had already begun by late 1941, when he approached the KPD leader, Jurgen Kuczynski, and asked to help the Soviet war effort. Soon, he was delivering reports on the British nuclear project to a Soviet contact whom he knew as “the girl from …show more content…
The project was unprecedented in its information control, and historian Robert S. Norris claimed that the security measures developed to keep the secret “served as a model for the postwar system.” Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan project, had a simple aim regarding secrecy: keep knowledge from as many people and countries as possible. In particular, the first two of his eight secrecy goals were “to keep knowledge from the Germans and, to a lesser degree, from the Japanese,” and “to keep knowledge from the Russians.” He took care to ensure that no one outside of the project would learn anything about it. Mail was opened and inspected for any suspicious communication. The leading scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, who had previous connections to leftist organizations, was under near constant surveillance. One scientist, Richard E. Heckert, recalled an anecdote regarding these near paranoid security