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Nuclear Weapons of the Atomic Agein 1949. Four years later, in 1953, they detonated their first fusion device. Kurchatov became know as \bomb,\nuclear weapons testing. The SpiesIt%u2019s unlikely that Kurchatov%u2019s bomb program would have progressed as rapidly as it did without information obtained through espionage. In fact, during World War II, there was a small legion of Soviet spies in the U.S.%u2014the most notable being Klaus Fuchs. A German theoretical physicist, Fuchs emigrated to England in 1933, where he received his PhD in 1937, and later a Doctorate of Science. In 1943, while still living in Great Britain, he began spying for the Soviet Union. When the British selected a group of its top scientists to travel overseas and participate in the Manhattan Project, Fuchs was on their list. After arriving at Los Alamos in August 1944, he contributed greatly to America%u2019s atomic-bomb project. He even shared an important patent with mathematician John von Neuman. At the same time, Fuchs supplied a phenomenal amount of secret information about bomb development to Igor Kurchatov in the Soviet Union. After the war, Klaus returned to Great Britain and became head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment. From this new post, he forwarded hydrogenbomb secrets to the Soviets. In late 1949, he was suspected of being a spy and was called in for questioning. He confessed on January 27, 1950. His trial lasted less than 90 minutes, and he was sentenced to 14 years in prison, of which he served nine years and four months.Fuchs wasn%u2019t the only spy at Los Alamos. Machinist David Greenglass was able to pass crude schematics of lab experiments to the Soviets. After his arrest and trial, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but served just 10. American Harry Gold operated as the middleman between both Greenglass and Fuchs and the USSR. He eventually received a thirty-year prison sentence in 1951. After serving just over half of that time, he took a job as a hospital chemist in Philadelphia.Many experts believe that some of the Soviet spies have never been identified. Consider George Koval, who was born in Iowa, but moved with his family to the Soviet Union during the Great Depression in search of a more promising life. After joining a collective farm, he attended the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow. There, he was recruited by the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) where he received specialized espionage training. After being sent back to the U.S., he enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the Oak Ridge Laboratory. While there, he passed classified information to the Soviets. Koval returned to the Soviet Union in 1948. His spying and espionage remained completely unknown to U.S. authorities until November 2, 2007, when he was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Russians After Klaus Fuchs was released from prison in 1959, he emigrated to the German Democratic Republic, where he continued his scientific career. He was eventually appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he retired in 1979.