The Castillo Street Bridge in Santa Fe was the site of a fateful meeting between Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs and his handler, Harry Gold.
Narrator: Klaus Fuchs, the notorious spy who worked on the Manhattan Project, helped the Soviet Union develop an atomic bomb. Historians Jon Hunner and John Earl Haynes tell us more.
Jon Hunner: There were three spies that we know of that operated in Los Alamos. Of course, the most famous is Klaus Fuchs, who was a German physicist who fled Nazi Germany, then went and worked in Britain and was part of the British Mission. When he was in Germany, he was a Communist Party member, pretty active.
Then he was sent over to Los Alamos as part of the British Mission. He then worked on the atomic bomb.
Then in the spring of 1945, a Soviet agent from New York called Harry Gold came to New Mexico and made contact with two of the three spies. He made contact with Klaus Fuchs. Klaus Fuchs had a car and so he drove into Santa Fe, picked up Harry Gold, and then went to the Castillo Bridge.
Klaus Fuchs opened up his briefcase, took out the plans for the “Fat Man” bomb, gave them to Harry Gold, who then took them and eventually went back to New York. They were put in a diplomatic pouch and sent to the Soviet Union.
That was the most damaging information that was leaked out of Los Alamos, and actually was the blueprint for the first Soviet bomb that detonated in 1949. Other Soviet bombs then develop their own designs, but that first one was blueprint Los Alamos courtesy of Klaus Fuchs.
John Earl Haynes: Fuchs was a senior scientist working in the theoretical division on the plutonium bomb. He was a very high-placed and very useful source.
The Soviets learned from espionage what worked and what didn’t work. All of the blind alleys that we went down, they didn’t have to go down. They were able to carry out their project at only a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the time, and a fraction of the manpower that ours had. If there had been no espionage, certainly, the Soviets would have developed a bomb in time. But because of espionage, they developed it much faster and much cheaper.