The Spy Who Changed the World

A “gripping and fast-paced” biography of the brilliant atomic physicist and Soviet double agent who smuggled nuclear secrets out of Los Alamos and Harwell (The Guardian). Klaus Fuchs, a German Communist and gifted mathematician who fled the Nazis, went on to become the head of theoretical physics at the Harwell Research Complex in England. There and at the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico, Fuchs was an integral part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. But then, in February of 1950, he was brought before London’s Old Bailey criminal court, accused of passing crucial military secrets to the Soviet Union. And his confession would shock the world. For more than sixty years, the governments of Britain, the United States, and Russia all tried to cover up the full extent of Fuchs’s treachery. Piecing the story together from their declassified archives, The Spy Who Changed the World reveals the truth about Fuchs and his long career of espionage for the first time. Historian Mike Rossiter demonstrates how Fuchs played a pivotal role in the nuclear arms race by sharing vital information about the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb with the Soviet government. It is a dramatic tale of clandestine meetings, deadly secrets, family entanglements and illicit love affairs, all set against the tumultuous years from the rise of Hitler to the start of the Cold War.