Klaus Fuchs

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (1911 to 1988) was a German theoretical physicist, the son of a Lutheran pastor, who fled Nazi Germany to Britain and took his doctorate at the University of Bristol. He worked on the British Tube Alloys atomic project and then, from 1943, on the Manhattan Project, where at Los Alamos he made significant theoretical calculations on implosion for the first nuclear weapons. After the war he headed the Theoretical Physics Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. In January 1950 he confessed to having passed information on the project to the Soviet Union over seven years, and a British court sentenced him to fourteen years in prison. After his release he moved to East Germany, where he resumed a career as a physicist and research leader.