Whether the espionage information significantly aided the speed of the Soviet Atomic Bomb Project is also disputed. While some of the information given, such as the highly technical theoretical information given by Klaus Fuchs , would be thought to have certainly aided in developing a nuclear weapon, the manner in which the heads of the Soviet bomb project, Igor Kurchatov and Lavrenty Beria , actually used the information has led later scholars to doubt it having had a role in increasing the speed of development. According to this account, Kurchatov and Beria used the information primarily as a "check" against their own scientists' work, and did not liberally share the information with them, distrusting both their own scientists as well as the espionage information. Later scholarship has also shown that the decisive force in early Soviet development was not problems in weapons design, but, as in the Manhattan Project , the difficulty in procuring fissile materials, especially as the Soviet Union had no Uranium deposits known when it began its program (unlike the United States).
Some of the most prominent Atom Spies include:
- Klaus Fuchs – German refugee theoretical physicist who worked with the British delegation at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project . He was eventually discovered, confessed, and sentenced to jail in Britain. He was later released, and he emigrated to East Germany .
- Theodore Hall – a young American physicist at Los Alamos, whose identity as a spy was not revealed until very later in the twentieth century. He was never tried for his espionage work, though seems to have admitted to it in later years to reporters and to his family.
- David Greenglass – an American machinist at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Greenglass confessed that he gave crude schematics of lab experiments to the Russians during World War II. Some aspects of his testimony against his sister and brother-in-law (the Rosenbergs, see below) are now thought to have been fabricated in an effort to keep his own wife from prosecution. Greenglass confessed to his espionage and was given a long prison term.
- Ethel And Julius Rosenberg – Americans who were supposedly involved in coordinating and recruiting an episonage network which included David Greenglass. While most scholars believe that Julius was likely involved in some sort of network, whether or not Ethel was involved or cogniscent of the activities remains a matter of dispute. Julius and Ethel refused to confess to any charges, and were convicted and executed.
- Harry Gold – American, confessed to acting as a courier for Greenglass and Fuchs.
Much of the information about this espionage work came from the VENONA project, which intercepted and decrypted Soviet intelligence transcripts during and after World War II, and later records from Soviet archives, which were briefly opened to researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some information, and its interpretation, is a matter of scholarly dispute, however.
- Alexei Kojevnikov, ''Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists'' (Imperial College Press, 2004). ISBN 1860944205 (use of espionage data by Soviets)
- Gregg Herken, ''Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller'' (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2002). ISBN 0805065881 (details on Fuchs)
- Richard Rhodes , ''Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). ISBN 068480400X (general overview of Fuchs and Rosenberg cases)
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