How Possible Is Secrecy?

Suppose Klaus Fuchs had worked for Hitler. After all, Fuchs was a German, and the Germans could have used his information. The Soviets, at that time, could not. To be sure, they wanted all the information they could get, but they were more than satisfied (as was Great Britain) to leave production to America. Before 1945, Moscow did not need the secret data Fuchs sent from Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.

The situation was radically different in Germany. It is one of the majestic ironies of history that the Third Reich and Fascist Italy should have alienated from Continental Europe so many of the scientists who were to play decisive roles in the development of America’s atomic bomb. By an added twist, it was in Berlin that Otto Hahn and Friedrich Strassmann identified as barium a product of the neutron bombardment of uranium.

ME

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Medford Evans

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Suppose Klaus Fuchs had worked for Hitler. After all, Fuchs was a German, and the Germans could have used his information. The Soviets, at that time, could not. To be sure, they wanted all the information they could get, but they were more than satisfied (as was Great Britain) to leave production to America. Before 1945, Moscow did not need the secret data Fuchs sent from Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.

The situation was radically different in Germany. It is one of the majestic ironies of history that the Third Reich and Fascist Italy should have alienated from Continental Europe so many of the scientists who were to play decisive roles in the development of America’s atomic bomb. By an added twist, it was in Berlin that Otto Hahn and Friedrich Strassmann identified as barium a product of the neutron bombardment of uranium.