Klaus Fuchs says nothing in Oppenheimer, but by giving the Russians atomic secrets he maintained a balance of power
There is a character in Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer who lurks in the background of many scenes; a tall, balding, shadowy figure without a single line of dialogue. But he is the second most important person in the story of the atomic bomb.
J Robert Oppenheimer built the bomb. And Klaus Fuchs stole it.
The Manhattan Project, and the Los Alamos Laboratory under Oppenheimer, produced the first nuclear weapons. The project cost some $2 billion (about $21 billion today) and employed 130,000 people. One of them was Fuchs, a brilliant physicist and a KGB agent, who passed those dangerous scientific secrets to Stalin, enabling the Soviet Union to build its own bomb.
Not an honourable act in my view.
