I was unaware of his story growing up, but he plays an extremely small role in one of Feynman’s autobiographies, IIRC supplying the car Dick used to visit his wife in the hospital. Feynman wondered later whether the trunk held classified materials.
However you may feel about his treachery, history seems to have proven him correct; deterrence is what prevents nuclear attacks. The article rightly points out that he shared America’s nuclear secrets with not only the Russians, but the British, and most likely for this reason.
There was no risk of retaliation when McArthur demanded the use nuclear weapons in Korea. Truman turned him down and sacked him anyways.
Fuchs was like almost every other soviet spy in WW2 and post-war / pre-cold war action - a useful idiot who refused to believe the reports at the end of the war of the mass wave or rape and pillage that the Soviets unleashed on Germany, or the political terror that Stalin unleashed. This was understandable, given that spreading such information (until Khrushchev legendary denunciation of Stalin after his death) was a great way to kill your career, and/or your life.
There was a unbelievable amount of naivete among the atomic scientsts, that worked across all different parts of the political spectrum. Many were openly talking about a government that would replace democratically elected institutions with a technocracy where only the informed civil servents would make centrally planned decisions for the good of all mankind. Many bought the idea that the USSR’s actions in Europe were justified because it was the only path to true communism. Many became the monsters that they fought - willing to justify anything to roll back fascism and later communism.
Regardless, the idea that Fuchs was only moved by a rational actor theory is very hard to support.
Are Spies More Trouble Than They’re Worth?
(The history of espionage is a lesson in paradox: the better your intelligence, the dumber your conduct; the more you know, the less you anticipate.)
The information Fuchs gave the Russians turned a research problem into an engineering problem.
The Russians learned what the US scientists did to create a working device. From that point, the Russian scientists had a greatly simplified task. They just had to re-engineer something they knew could work if they did it right.
