Q: British scientist Klaus Fuchs plays a role in the hydrogen bomb story.
Tell me about the information he gives his Soviet contact in 1947 and 1948
after returning to England from the United States.
DH: After Fuchs gets back to London, you know comes back from Los Alamos [the
U.S. weapons lab], he has meetings with his new control in London. And [at]
the first meeting in 1947...one of the questions that was put to him is what
can you tell us about the superbomb. And he provides some information then.
But in a subsequent meeting in March of 1948 he provides documents and ideas
about the design of the superbomb. In particular, the classical super and more
particularly an idea on which he had worked and for which he had got a joint
patent with John von Neumann, and that was the idea of radiation implosion, of
using radiation to implode the thermonuclear fuel, so to achieve the reactions
in that way...That's very important in the history of the Soviet project
because the information, the detailed information that Fuchs supplies leads to
an important organizational measure which is essentially to set up a new group
in Moscow to look into work that's been done on the design of a thermonuclear
bomb.
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