1st March - This day in History

1950: Fuchs guilty of espionage

In London, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who helped build the first two U.S. atomic bombs, is convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Because he committed the espionage before the USSR was designated a British enemy, he was only sentenced to 14 years. Fuchs, a Communist, fled Germany for Britain after the rise of Adolf Hitler. In 1943, he was enlisted into the U.S. atomic program and soon was relating precise information about the U.S. nuclear program to a Soviet spy. In 1945, Fuchs returned to England, where he was arrested by British intelligence in December 1949. The discovery of Fuchs' espionage came four months after the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb, a development that helped motivate U.S. President Harry Truman to approve the U.S. hydrogen bomb program.