NOVA – Secrets, Lies and Atomic Spies

Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies — Transcript

Bombshell : The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy, by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel

Ted Hall was a physics prodigy so gifted that he was asked to join the Manhattan Project when he was only eighteen years old. There, in wartime Los Alamos, working under Robert Oppenheimer and Bruno Rossi, Hall helped build the atomic bomb. To his friends and coworkers he was a brilliant young rebel with a boundless future in atomic science. To his Soviet spymasters, he was something else: “Mlad,” their mole within Los Alamos, a most hidden and valuable asset and the men who first slipped them the secrets to the making of the atomic bomb.

In a book that will force the revision of fifty years of scholarship and reporting on the Cold War, award-winning journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal for the first time a devastatingly effective Soviet spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project and ferried America’s top atomic secrets to Stalin. At the heart of the network was Hall, who was so secret an operative that even Klaus Fuchs, his fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet agent, had no idea they were comrades. Bombshell tracks Hall from his days as a brilliant schoolboy in New York City, when he came under the influence of his older brother’s radical tracts, and on to Harvard, Los Alamos, and Chicago, where Hall continued to spy even after the war was over, passing more secrets while the Soviets were trying to build the Hydrogen bomb.

For forty years only a few Russians knew what Ted Hall really did. Now Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal the astonishing true story of the atomic spies who got away. Bombshell is history at its most explosive.

Now a new documentary purports to stand the Ted Hall story on its head

Can An American Scientist Who Smuggled Critical Nuclear Secrets to the Russians After World War II Be Considered a “Good Guy”? New Film Says Yes, by Ron Ridenour

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