A few things I like to keep in mind about soviet spies of this era, especially in regard to nukes.
1) The USSR was the UKs and the USs ally in WWII, and all the propaganda was saying as such.
2) It would not be a stretch to think that having only a single nation, no matter how benevolent, with nukes is a bad idea. There's a lot of temptation when you're the only guy with the giant mushroom cloud backing you.
A lot of the double agents who defected did say they were doing it for vaguely benevolent reasons, although it gives me some satisfaction to say that many (e.g. Philby) died depressed, allegedly suicidal alcoholics upon facing the realities of house arrest in the Soviet Union.
Aldrich Ames seems to genuinely believe that what he did is morally equivalent to doing for ideological reasons.
Not to mention that Russia bore the brunt of human loss in the war for the Allies. It's quite staggering that in 1945, most people in Europe felt that the Soviet Union had done the most to defeat the Nazi regime, but that by modern day, most people think it was the U.S.
To be sure, the Soviets would have lost the war if it were not for the U.S. The Russian breadbasket had been taken by the Nazis, and the retreating Russians burned everything to the ground as they gave ground. But when you look at the erasure of the Russian role in fighting the Nazis, as well as the troublesome views of leaders like Churchill, you wonder not only about Fuchs, but also about the clean version of history we're taught about that war.
We don't feel the US did more in terms of quantity of dead men, we know more Soviet-affiliated troops died there. However with hindsight we now know the real plan of the Soviet Union - it never was to help Europe, but to conquer it. So in conclusion the US government helped us more (and not just during the war), while the SU government sent more people to die for their shady goals here. Nobody is discounting the heroism of the individual soldiers. The sad thing is that the current Russian government is using their legacy to pursue their shady goals again.
That needs some serious citations. If you're saying it's evidenced by the soviet military in the Eastern block I encourage you to look at the US presence in Nato countries. I know that history in the US is largely a picture of American exceptionalism and "we were always the good guys", but actual history has many more shades of gray. This is one thing that the allies (in both parts of Germany) did reasonably well, break the circle of history as a means for teaching patriotism.
I know of the US presence in NATO countries and we welcome it. It is absolutely incomparable to the Warsaw Pact occupation of our country (for example, the US forces didn't shoot anybody nor ran over people with a tank) which is the reason why we welcomed the US forces and joined NATO as soon as we could after 1989. Not sure what citations should I send you, I live here (Czechia). You can probably read about it on Wikipedia, I'd do the same.
US forces tend to do their shooting and running over in Central/South America and the Middle East. Many countries in those areas are less impressed by US benevolence.
The US is an empire. So was the USSR. So are China and modern Russia. Some provinces are treated better than others, but empires are empires, and propaganda, political manipulation, corruption, violence, and torture are how they roll - together with resource capture, labour management, and various levels of market development.
Europe had a notable level of propaganda and political manipulation, and still does, and not so much of the overt violence. But just because the corruption, violence and torture were happening elsewhere doesn't mean they weren't happening at all.
I do not say that it's not happening. That does not mean we do not welcome the US, or that its actions here are comparable to the actions of the SU, or that the SU, a comparably much worse regime which caused dozens of millions deaths after the war (many in the SU itself, but not only), helped Europe more.
I guess I should thank the SU for stealing our uran, making my fellow citizens forcibly work in the mines as a punishment for not being communist enough, and for hindering our economical development by decades (of the country that used to be one of the most advanced European states before the war, and got destroyed AFTER the war so much that it fell below Africa in HDI)? Well, thanks...
I don't know, why does it matter? How does it change their final goals, visible from their political actions since around 1943? Why do you think I claim they had a master plan from the beginning?
> However with hindsight we now know the real plan of the Soviet Union - it never was to help Europe, but to conquer it.
I think you don't even need the hindsight, just look at history: Soviet Union and Nazi Germany started the war as allies, their first action was splitting Poland... why would anyone expect they would have stopped there?
So, essentially, we are supposed to thank Russians for liberating us from their former allies (and even that only happened because their former allies stabbed them in the back first). I don't know... after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, what options had Soviet Union left other than fighting back?
If you become friends with the Nazis, start a war together as allies, then you get betrayed by them, then you defend yourself successfully (with help of many other countries) and finally defeat them... that doesn't really make you a textbook example of a good guy. You need a lot of propaganda to make people forget how this all started.
I find this line of reasoning strange. The USSR was invaded by evil Nazis who wanted to enslave them for a thousand years.
Somehow we spin this into "Stalin didn't care".
And the idea that Russians had to be forced at gunpoint to defend their country is so ludicrous and offensive I have no words.
That's not just an idea. Order No. 270 ordered to shoot any deserters (or anybody who's not 'organizing resistance') on the spot and promised imprisonment for families of those who surrendered to the Germans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_No._270
On the other hand the USSR allied itself with the evil Nazis so they would both invade Poland. The USSR was clearly an expansionist and imperalist power and given the gulag system reached it's peak well before the start of the war, we know Stalin did not care at all about human life.
A lot of the Russian people didn't have much love for the Russian regime (ie. Stalin). The Nazi's were in a lot of places in Russia initially greeted as liberators. If the Nazi's hadn't turned out to be even more brutal then Stalin history might have taken a different path.
Is it "staggering" though? In the short term, it is more simple to point to human lives and deaths. In the longer term, the more complex contribution of industrial forces is easier to understand. At least some shift in public opinion is natural.
Oddly, one of the worst leaks to the soviets was the press release announcing the A-bomb drop on Hiroshima. It specifically revealed the use of diffusion for uranium enrichment, IIRC.
Does anyone know how effective his intel was? Did he transfer key secrets, or crude napkin drawings?
Put another way: did he change the world? That’s the goal of idealism, after all.
It seems absurd to say that the USSR developed nukes thanks to his help. And yet, I can’t help but wonder... Could one person have made all the difference?
Those are the known knowns. There are also the known unknowns, the aliases from intercepted messages who were never matched to identities, and the unknown unknowns, the ones we haven't found out about. One of the spies on the Wikipedia list only had their identity revealed last year.
It's about 'when' more than anything. We live in a world today with mostly free information sharing on most scientific subjects. But picture a time when cutting edge science like the nuclear programs were veiled heavily in secrecy. Every single development took time, effort, work, science. And the result is... an answer that can probably be written down in a single piece of paper. Easily shared.
The USSR would have developed the same bombs eventually, but not as quickly, I would guess.
Basic science is done in the open, but science relevant to military goals is still kept secret. For example, do you know how stealth fighter jets are made?
There's actually quite a bit of information about the development of the F-117, as well as the science and math that made it possible: https://www.f117sfa.org/f117-development
We have not yet figured out how to make fusion work yet. A lot of money and scientific effort is being spent to find out. We aren't talking about things that are 10 years away, we're talking about research that has succeeded being shared.
But as soon as someone does figure out fusion (ITER looks good) and publishes, everyone will know, and everyone will have it.
He passed on a great deal of highly technical information, it wasn't napkins. It probably helped the Soviets get to a working weapon faster but it's generally accepted they'd have got there without the espionage as well.
It would have taken them longer. They might have learned of the dangers of radiation from research rather than after causing unbelievable nuclear pollution. Or from the American experience once the dangers of radiation were well publicized later (though that might not have happened without a nuclear arms race).
If you read Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the author claims that the information was mostly used by soviets to make sure they were on the right track, rather than outright copying. If there were 10 ways to do something, the soviets picked a couple of the most promising, then used intel to make sure they what they were doing was broadly similar to what the americans were doing. This still could save a lot of time and money vs. the american way of doing all 10 at once and seeing which worked.
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb goes into a lot of detail about what was taken and how it was used. What astonished me is that using lend-lease, the soviets were sending back literal plane loads of documents every week through alaska. The sheer scale of the spying was amazing. The USA mostly let it slide during the war, bigger fish to fry and all that.
I think the interesting question is how much the spying led to the failure of the Baruch Plan. A few years of delay in the Soviet weapons program would have meant they had no weapon by the time Stalin died, and Khrushchev was open to bilateral demilitarization.
Setting aside the long term ideological goals of worldwide spread of communism by Soviet Union, they were not in position to do so in Western Europe after U.S. acquired nuclear weapons. Soviet westward expansion stopped after assimilating most of the Eastern Europe.
Acquisition of nuclear weapons by Soviet Union and later reaching parity with the USA, was a major factor stopping WWIII from occurring. Long list of characters, including Winston Churchill, Curtis LeMay, John von Neumann and countless other were advocating a preemptive nuclear strike on Soviet Union.
Clearly Fuchs was played by Soviet spies, but in the greater scheme of things, he may have contributed to saving tens of millions of lives.
Worth noting that US estimates of the effects of them attacking with nuclear weapons in the early 1960s was 600 million dead - a lot in Western Europe and elsewhere.
This was known to be an underestimate as US planning did not take into effect the thermal effects of nuclear weapons due to a degree of variability from cloud cover etc. So probably about a billion would have died - then there is the effect of Soviet weapons...
I can recommend Daniel Ellsberg's book on the topic:
but it never did happen, who's to say the US being the only super power with nukes, could've had a despot rise (one might be now), who if there were no other countries with nukes, might decide to use a few for the purpose of conquest.
Sure, nukes are bad, all mankind should probably ditch the tech, but it's like a gun... i'd rather be in a mexican standoff, than empty handed staring down the barrel of a gun.
Currently, I'm not very trusting of our (US) government and their 'goals'. Trump may or may not have known Putin was murdering our soldiers. The fact is, at least there's some solace knowing nukes will probably never be used (except maybe by N.Korea - but as a suicide action by a crazy neurotic dictator), and that there's a sort of checks/balances system as far as they are concerned.
Nobody rational, wants a nuclear war or fallout or nuclear winter.
Russia never building their own, also allows one side dominate in power, and power corrupts, so maybe it helped even the equilibrium. Not saying them having weapons is great, but who's to know what future would await a nazi army rising in America and being the only country with nuclear capabilities. We still might get that future, but at least there's some balance from other countries in case certain scenarios happen.
It's naive to think 'our country' will always be benign and have everybody's best interests in mind... just as it would've been naive for Germans to think that in 1930.
