Klaus Fuchs, according to a 1951 report by the US Congress, “influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States but in the history of nations”. That judgement seems unarguable: from 1941 to 1949 Fuchs was at the centre of the British and American nuclear programmes and he provided the Soviets with every secret that came into his hands, from the fruits of Britain’s early research into a fission device using uranium’s unstable isotope U235, to the discovery of the explosive potential of plutonium, to the theory behind a much more powerful hydrogen bomb using nuclear fusion. It was largely because of Fuchs that the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb in 1949, to the astonishment of the US and Britain.
Although it appears to endorse this judgement in its subtitle, Frank Close’s Trinity presents a considerably more nuanced picture of the “most dangerous spy in history”. Close does not play down the impact of Fuchs’s espionage, but provides three arguments in retrospective mitigation for his crimes. The first is Fuchs’s personal history.
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