OK, well, everyone, welcome to the first of the Friends of the Bodley lunchtime lectures for this term.
These lectures are open to everyone this class of public benefit of the charity.
But of course we have many events that are exclusive to members.
And if those in the audience who are thinking of becoming members, we have brochures here and you can go online.
Just give you one example at the coming AGM on the 25th of June.
We shall have the poets. We shall have the novelist Margaret Drabble speaking to us for that.
That will be for members a members only now.
Today, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome our most distinguished speaker, Frank Lucas,
who is emeritus professor of theoretical physics and emeritus fellow at Exeter College since 2001,
and he's very well known to many of you for his numerous very elegant books and popular science,
including The Void, The Infinity Puzzle and Anti-Matter.
And I should tell you that some time ago, I saw Very Cool a Dan Brown movie and asked one of my colleagues about the
physicist Was it possible to carry a bucket of anti-matter into the Vatican?
And by way of response, they gave me friends, spoke spoken anti-matter, which I then read, so I now know it is now packed.
Prior to 2001, Professor Place was head of theoretical physics rather lab on the Harwell campus, a post that in 1949 was held by Clough Swoosh.
The Atom spy and Wright got his details from Oxford in 1970, when Rudolf Pyles, father of the atomic bomb was professor.
Many of papers, including communications with fish, are housed in the Bodleian, and today Anne Frank will reveal some of these to us.
These are documents which helped him research his latest, highly acclaimed book,
Trinity The Treachery in Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History, and Copies are available in Blackwell's if anyone wishes.
When afterwards. So I would ask you to give a very warm welcome indeed to Professor Close.
Thank you very much.
I mean, I should start by thanking innumerable people here in the modelling that helped me over the last several years in the research.
Too many to name, but I would like in particular to to mention Colin Harris, who's here, as we will see.
There's a wonderful collection of photographs that Chris Fletcher, who's in the college, told me about two to three years ago.
And Colin, and I think the best of the whole of the research was the day that we cracked the code,
which showed how to work out which negatives corresponded to which pictures in this.
And while you see the benefits of that, let me just give you some background to this before I focus in on the modelling contribution.
So Rudolf Pyles or Rudy, he was the we call him professor here from 1963,
and he has been widely acclaimed as being the greatest theoretical physicist never to have won the Nobel prise for today's talk.
I think perhaps the two things we need to bring out are that in 1940 he was like the father of the atomic bomb,
and I will explain what I mean by that in a moment and also became a mentor to the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs.
And the reason that I called the book Trinity was twofold.
One was that Trinity was the codename for the first test of the atomic bomb in 1945.
But also, there's a sort of slight, you could say, the religious aspects the father, son and Holy Ghost that pyles was buying regular claim.
The the father of the atomic bomb, Klaus Fuchs, who was his assistant, lived with the family in their home in Birmingham,
initially became almost a member of the family and was described as almost like a son.
So there's the father and the son. There isn't any Holy Ghost in this,
but there are the spooks of MI5 and FBI because one of the things that fascinated me when I was doing the research, as we will see,
was that the reason that Fuchs eventually got caught was that some mention of him in some
Russian coded cables were deciphered by GQ and pointed to either piles or Fuchs being a spy.
And I was fascinated to know how the security services eventually decided, indeed, that it was Fuchs and not piles.
So to give a bit of a flesh the outline, and then we'll move in on it.
Pyles had the idea of the atomic bomb in 1940. By 1941.
He was desperately in need of an assistant, and that is how Klaus Fuchs came to work with him.
They were both. They had both fled from Germany, from Nazi Germany piles because he was Jewish.
Fuchs because he was anti-Nazi, as we will see.
And initially at the University of Birmingham, they worked for two years working out the theory of how to.
Enrich uranium into a form that could be used to make a bomb.
And the experimental tests of that theory were done up the road here in the Clarendon Lab, initially by 1944.
The whole project moved across North America, and Fuchs and Pyles were part of the British delegation that went across there.
And folks continued passing information to the Russians, initially from New York,
and then they will move to Los Alamos, where the bomb itself was constructed. The bomb was tested used over Japan at the end of the war.
Fuchs stayed in Los Alamos for one further year, and then he came back to Harwell,
the new laboratory just down the road here from Oxford, which was developing the beginnings of nuclear power.
And he continued passing information to the Russians.
And by this stage, we know in the Cold War during the war itself, the Russians at least were allies,
whereas in the post-war period the Cold War was beginning and it was a very different kettle of fish.
So from 1941 to 1950,
Fuchs was passing information for nine whole years on the atomic bomb and the emerging knowledge of nuclear power to the Russians.
And he would have got away with it had it not been for the fact that in August 1949, some descriptions were finally successful of Russian cables.
One of these referred to an agent by codename Rest.
All that it was possible to deduce about rest was that he was a British scientist who had been working on a particular area of science in New York,
and it was either piles or fix one of the things I discovered, but not from the modelling.
Unfortunately, for 60 years, it has always been believed that it was J.
Edgar Hoover and the FBI, the National Security Agency in the states that were the prime movers in cracking the codes that led to the exposure.
And I discovered that is not the case. It was actually GC HQ that were key to this.
And I'll say no more about that. If you want to know more about it, you can read about it in the book or ask me in private.
But today, as far as I know, there's nothing in the body and about that, but who knows what might still be buried there?
So let's get into the story for us to introduce the characters.
Rudolph and Jennifer Pyles were both Jewish. He was German, she was Russian, and they fled from Germany in 1932 for racial reasons.
Klaus Fuchs was born in 1911. He was Lutheran. He was a Social Democrat and an anti-Nazi Nazi.
Now, in 1933, when the Nazis took over in Germany, the Communists were the only people prepared to put candidates up against them in the elections.
And that is how Fuchs then became involved as a student activist and eventually a member of the Communist Party.
He was then on a Gestapo hit list, and he was tipped off that the Gestapo were about to arrest him.
And he managed to escape, and he escaped initially to France and then came across to Britain, to Bristol.
And that was where he was when the war began. Now, this is for some reason, frozen.
Good. OK. So we now come to the first of the documents that are in the Bodleian.
The original idea that led to the atomic bomb 1940 in Birmingham.
Rudolph Pyle's and Otto Frisch, another emigre from Germany, had the insight the idea of nuclear fission have been discovered in 1938.
That was well known. People thought it might be possible to build what we now call a nuclear reactor if you had tons of the stuff.
But the idea of making a nuclear explosion seem to be impossible.
Then Pyles realised that if you could enrich this uranium, there are about seven atoms in every thousand of uranium our special uranium 235,
and they are the bits that are potentially explosive, but they're only seven in every 1000.
If you could have enriched uranium to have more of that stuff, how much would you need to make an explosion?
And the shock was when they discovered that the size of a grapefruit would be sufficient to make a nuclear explosion.
And that was the moments when the whole project that eventually led to the atomic bomb began and fresh and piles wrote a memorandum.
And there's a photocopy there of part of that memorandum from the bodley in here.
They actually wrote two memoranda, one a technical version and one a shorter pedagogic version for the use of politicians and others.
The technical version is the one that we have here in the Bodleian. The pedagogic version is in the National Archives in Kew.
And I'll just quickly give you three bits from this. Remember, this is 1940, and they've discovered the idea of an atomic bomb as a weapon.
The super bomb would be practically irresistible. That's the very first thing that they say.
There is no material or structure that could resist the force of the explosion.
That's the first thing that has frightened owing to the spreading of radioactive substances with the wind.
The bomb could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians.
And this may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country.
And then the third point, if one were the moment they have discovered this.
The immediate panic is anybody who done research knows you hit your head against the wall trying to solve the problem the moment you've solved it.
It seems so obvious you wonder why it took so long.
So fission piles have now realised the answer, and the immediate thought is How's Germany already got this far?
And so they then say if one works on the assumption that Germany is or will be in the possession of this weapon,
it must be realised that no shelters are available that will be effective and could be used in a large scale.
The most effective reply would be a counter threat with a similar bomb.
So in 1940, in this memorandum, they have already had the idea of what we now call mutually assured destruction.
And it was the fear that the Germans could be developing this weapon that led to the whole project,
which was originally known as tube alloys and then became the Manhattan Project.
Now, by May 1941, the work was getting so intense that Pyles was needing the assistance he knew of Klaus Fuchs.
And Fuchs came and joins him as the assistant and lived in the house with them as a member of the family like a son.
And I thought we might start by just hearing Rudolph piles from the archives here saying it himself, how he hired Fuchs.
And then the second clip, some comments about their politics.
I know before the war, when he was first a graduate student in Bristol, well, we have common interests.
Some of his work, which we discussed it, came to respect him as a scientist.
So what do we need more people in the world?
I decided to ask back to work with us on theoretical work relating to public energy.
I couldn't believe that, of course I talking. Something important.
Thank you, Ken. I definitely was extremely useful.
Will. Quick on the uptake, flexible, willing to look at.
No problems. From that point of view, I think it made a better choice that we had a very big heart and always.
We've made politics possible at that time. They have course everybody.
Same view. Other things must have come up, I don't recall, but certainly the best political discussions in his presence.
And he managed them later to give the impression that he had everybody else's will be our guest at that time.
There probably was. Some of the volunteers.
But in no way. So that's piles the little icon whenever you see the Bodleian libraries icon, that means it's from the archives here.
So that is pyles view of Fuchs now.
Fuchs was already a member of the Communist Party.
That didn't tell anybody that, obviously, and I was astonished that in the National Archives, the there are 25 volumes of MI5 files on Fuchs.
And the very first entry in all of those volumes is a letter from 1934 in which the German police have pointed out that
Fuchs was in the Communist Party and that they had found books of the Communist Party in Futurs House when it was raided.
But the security authorities completely disregarded this because it originated with the Gestapo, and therefore they regard it as not trustworthy.
And the great irony is that throughout the whole of future's career, every time he was vetted, initially when he started with piles.
Secondly, when he moved across the North America. Thirdly, when he went to Los Alamos.
Fourthly, when he came to Harwell post war on each and every occasion, this was disregarded because he came from the Gestapo.
The so he's now working with piles from May forty one in June 41.
The pact between the Soviet Union and Nazis broke down, so the Soviets now became our allies.
Churchill gave a speech on the old home service Radio four.
It now is in which he said that Stalin is now our ally and we will do everything we can to help.
And I think folks took that as a call to arms and started spying.
And for the first year or so, there's the famous story of how he used to meet what was called the girl from Banbury,
Ursula Kaczynski, who was the chief illegal for the glue network of the Soviet Union here during the war.
She lived up the Woodstock Road for a while, then in Killington, and then the time when she was dealing with folks was nearer to chipping Norton.
Great role, right? And she would go to Bhambri, and Fuchs would come from Birmingham to Banbury,
and they would meet and he would pass information to her and she would ship it across to the Russians.
And one of the fascinating questions to me had always been, Well, how did Fuchs manage to do this?
He's living in the pyles house. He has to get away, have a good reason to be out going after Bhambri in the middle of the war time to meet this woman.
And indeed, I've now found an answer, at least on one occasion, thanks to some papers that are here in the Bodleian.
The bit at the bottom there is not from the body, and that is a transcription of some KGB files.
The report on Fuchs passing information via via Sonya, as she was known.
What's interesting is the dates at the bottom. He passed information on five occasions to her.
One of them was Twelfth of July 1943. I've highlighted that one on the 12th of July 1943.
Information was passed to the Soviet Union from the Soviet Embassy.
So Fuchs had given that information to Sonya some days before that here in the Baldwin Library.
I decided to tackle things in two ways. One was to look at every entry in the index and the Fuchs.
And then I also decided I would look at everything under the dates covering from 1941 through the forty nine.
And in 1943 July, I found two very interesting letters.
So remember, Twelfth of July is the date when this information has been passed from Sonia on the you can read it better than me on the 6th of July.
The professor, who Rothery, who was actually a chemist here at Oxford,
has been writing a book and he's wanting it to have some checks made and he writes to piles and the suggestions be made that perhaps
folks might check some of the equations in this book and piles on the 8th of July replies that Fuchs is on holiday this week.
So his holiday obviously include a meeting with Sonia. So that's at least on one occasion, is how he covered his tracks, you know,
completely innocent letters until you happened by total chance to notice the dates corresponding with other things.
So that is, you know, after the event, we know how he did it.
On one occasion, was he always able to keep himself so in the in the clear?
Well, not according to Jeneyah Piles. And this fascinating interview with her is in the modelling records.
Any of you who ever heard Jeneyah speaking will be looking forward to hearing to her unique style of speaking English.
Oh, all right, cool. We always associate his mind.
It's great that he went outside the Russian embassy when he went through his contacts in Lausanne.
And, you know, so on. I called him Quentin because we out after these events.
He relaxed all rustic.
Look, that wouldn't usually have much depth that you would never think that he would lie very cool, looking miserable and big.
And that's a great time, one I can't remember exactly.
But that it's struck me. But it was subconscious because he was involved in the role that he won and that he
became his friend because I was looking for just that so clever somatic cell phones.
I sat. The next clip from Jeneyah is a description of Fuchs as a man who would hardly think this is what a spy should be like.
Let me play this next one. Optimistic people ask these are the fact that people would have thought.
In fact, the one got that bottle of vodka. I suppose you have to relax if you're a spy.
So that was the first period of his spying, the time in Birmingham.
There's nothing in the files here about the time when they're in America that you have to go elsewhere.
Then they all hate. The war was over. Piles returns to Birmingham University.
He didn't come to Oxford until 63, and Fuchs came to be head of the theoretical physics department at Harwell.
Thank you very much. An introduction for not introducing me like somebody who said that I was successor to Klaus Fuchs,
which I wasn't quite sure if that was a good thing or not.
And so what I what I wanted to show you now is something remarkable in the bottle collection.
Chris Fletcher. It actually college told me two or three years ago that the Bodleian had managed to purchase or
were in the process of purchasing a photographic collection from a scientist name of Tony Skimm.
Now, Tony Sq.m. Was a member of the British delegation in New York and Los Alamos, and he was an avid photographer.
Very high quality photographs. I mean, you'll be able to see later.
The. This lovely American collection in this one here, the other folders are more classic 1950s British type of photographic books.
But in the books, here are digital contact prints that he has made, which are sort of have limited use and help.
But there is an extensive index of all of the the images that he's taken.
It includes his comments on how good they were.
And amongst them eventually. In fact, Colin noticed that some of their Rudy on skis and gender and class on skis and so on.
So there was clear reference to photographs of the piles.
And it turns out in 1947, class folks hardly ever took any vacation.
On the one occasion he did in forty seven,
he went on a skiing holiday with the pyles family and with Tony Scott and Tony Scott and recorded this in photographs.
That was the good news you find in here. A little thumbnail picture of Jennifer Piles and Klaus Fuchs on skis.
But actually, that was rather limited value because it was so small.
Even taking a photograph of it wasn't very good. And then Colin noticed, you know, there was whole folders full of negatives.
And I think my sole contribution to the Bodleian Archives research was the day that we cracked the code to
show how the Tony Schemes list of negative numbers could be used to find the relevant negatives in the back.
Well, it was possible to find two within five negatives and little sac.
Then you had to put them on a light box and try mentally to imagine them.
The other way around is to which is the one you're looking for. And eventually we found them, and the quality of the images is remarkable.
I mean, here is a photograph of Jenna and playoffs.
And in fact, I have got that particular book open that page.
You can look at it afterwards, but to show you the quality of it, once you've got the negative,
you can then have that printed up in the bubbly and did, and you can zoom in and just look at the quality.
You are able to see the faces of the piles and Klaus Fuchs, his face in that image that was taken by squirm out there on the ski slopes.
You see them all resting, that is class folks lying on a rock wall behind him, Rudy Piles,
is whether he's taking a photograph or having a drink, I don't know, but they're having a rest during this trip.
To me, the most fascinating one because of the story with it is this picture here, which is Rudy piles in the front.
You can see Klaus Fuchs off on the left and next.
The clouds, folks, is Ronnie piles that was piles his son and then behind him is Jenny Piles and their daughter, Gabby.
Now of those people, Gabby Piles is the only one still alive.
She's 89 living in the states. And she was totally unaware of these photographs.
And she told me a story which had nothing to do with them, but it was about class, folks.
And then you will see why I'm telling you this story.
She said that Class Fox really was a member of the family, and she and her brother, Ronnie, loved him because he was unusual.
He was one of the very few adults that treated them like grown ups and they loved him.
And she particularly remembered how kind he was because once they were on a skiing holiday in Switzerland and they had been on a long,
long hike and her younger brother was getting very tired and falling behind.
She said My father was beginning to get cross. And Klaus Fuchs stayed with my brother and urged him on J for the picture.
In fact, as we zoom in, you can almost see there is there is Rudy, you striding on wanting them to keep coming in the background?
There is Klaus Fuchs with Ronnie and Zoom in further.
And even further, the quality in this picture is remarkable.
You can see Future's face, you can see Ronnie piles his face on that particular trip.
So that's another sequence of things that I had great fun with Colin, uh, going through and you can have a look at the folders there.
Uh, the the next sequence of things that came out of the Bodleian was something totally unexpected.
I found some evidence of spying that folks did.
That has never been recorded before, and it's all lying there in the body and except you would never know it was.
Unless you stumble by accident only then. Well, I'll tell you how it came about, I said that.
I went out looking for everything with Future's name in.
But I also looked for everything and certain spans of dates, and in the course of this I found something as a scientist, which was very interesting.
And then, as you will see, two completely different strands came together.
So I wanted to find out what was the science that was going on between 1946 and 1950.
And that was why I was looking at everything I could find in the modelling piles, papers.
And I found this very fascinating thing.
In March, the 8th of March 1946, a letter to Rudi Pyles from John Thompson of Imperial College JP Thomson won the Nobel prise for physics.
And he has. He has had the idea, which is key to what we now do down the road, a column of nuclear fusion.
And he's had a very deep insight. But before he goes public with it, he wants to check that he's not going to make a fool of himself.
So he wrote to Rudy Pyles to consult him. Dear piles.
It's interesting how they wrote in those days, you know, you wrote your friends by their surnames, dear piles.
I send you here with the manuscript in the hope that you will look through it.
It contains some ideas and a generation of nuclear energy, blah blah blah. That is what we all know.
Fusion to be today, that was not the reason why Thomson was excited or concerned.
And I often wondered why it was that fusion was declared secret.
I mean, what's the big deal there? The answer is, as well as producing energy,
it produced neutrons and neutrons were the things that required to convert uranium into plutonium, to make bombs.
And in 1946, they were building this huge nuclear reactor up in Cumbria wind scale.
Well, Sellafield.
To do that very thing, and Thompson's insight was that if you can make nuclear fusion, you could make the neutrons to make the plutonium much easier.
He says it would be a formidable source of plutonium using very little uranium.
That is why he has written to piles because of this possibility that he has a way of making the means to make bombs.
8tH of March 1946.
Totally unrelated to this 9th of March 46, a student named Jerry Gardner is writing to Rudolph Pyles, this student was at University of Southampton.
He wanted to join pilots at Birmingham to do a Ph.D., and he's arranged to come and see piles.
To that end, and indeed, Jerry Gardner in the visits, piles and you can go through the letters and correspondence, Pyle says.
There are some interesting questions here.
I don't want secret work in my department, but I'm sure we'll be able to find some things for you to work on.
And indeed, Jerry Gardner gets put to work on basically the idea that Thompson has just discussed with piles.
Two months later, Fuchs returns from America and visits pile to the weekend.
Those papers aren't in the body and we don't know what was said, but you can guess.
Because it becomes clear then that Jerry Gardner goes and works at Harwell with Fuchs, and he writes his thesis.
And in 1948, there's this lovely letter in the pyles papers here.
The registrar at the University of Birmingham is returning here with Please receive Dr. Faulkner's report on Jerry Gardner's thesis.
So Gardner has done his thesis on this. Fuchs has been the person who's examined the thesis, and Gordon's got his degree.
Wonderful. January 1950, shortly before Fuchs is arrested, Jerry Gardener writes a letter to Rudy Pyles full of concern.
Dear Prof.
Pyle's I have come across a Russian paper which appears to cover substantially the same ground as my thesis, which was published the year before.
It is clear that Fuchs had passed this information across there as well.
In fact, the missing links on this Thompson's papers are in Trinity College Cambridge Library.
And indeed, you can put the whole paper trail together. It was quite a fascinating thing, but it all started.
It was the baldly done it so that poor old Jerry Gardner, he's there working in the theory group that Harwell is a total disaster.
Fuchs is arrested and sent to jail. Fuchs is deputy, a man called Oscar.
Boogieman is wanted to leave because his wife, Mary, is having an affair with a junior member called Brian Flowers,
who some of you may know became Lord Flowers, the rector of Imperial College London, etc., etc. and Gerry Gardener not surprisingly, wants out.
And so he then writes to Pyle's about leaving Harwell and piles, you know, offers to be a referee.
Those of you who knew piles will be amused. This is typical Rudy piles in his response here.
If you do decide to apply for anything, you can certainly give my names a reference, but certainly not that of Fuchs.
I do not think many people will be broad minded enough to pay attention to a recommendation written in prison.
So this is all being wise after the event. What did Rudy actually feel at the time of the arrest?
I mean, this is where I want to now move towards the the personal elements of this things about when he was arrested.
When shock at first, I refused to believe when the first news came out, the article first and I thought maybe this was somebody else.
And then obviously the home then we thought made some sense that we all know this,
but I can't imagine things or have exactly put the importance of some level that took a long time for us, actually to convince ourselves.
It was a total shock here is a person who has not just been your technical assistant and colleague for nine years,
but has been living with you as a member of the family.
We've seen how his his daughter testified to me this fact, the important role that played in the family.
And now you discover that all along, he's been cheating, not just the nation, but you personally.
And that was a huge shock. What I really now come to, though, is I say here a letter that changed history.
It's on the visualiser as well. This is not the letter that change history.
The letter that shows history is the letter that Jeneyah wrote to Klaus Fuchs in response in part to this.
I'll tell you this the saga. So Phoenix is in jail.
And if you start reading that letter, it is fascinating because you see that, he says.
It was wonderful of Rudy to visit me on Saturday, although I couldn't do anything to cheer him up.
False humour. Do you mind if I talk of other things sometime I shall try and describe to you what went on in my mind?
But you will have to wait for this. Then he says, I have been sitting here some time now trying to think when your letter arrives.
So imagine stopping folks has written those first two paragraphs and then a letter from Jeneyah Pyles has arrived.
And it is really not legible on here other than to show you that the great thing
about the policies was that they kept copies of everything that they wrote.
So you actually have a bit like sometimes you hear one half of a mobile telephone conversation.
Well, you've got it all here. You've got the piles of outgoing letters. And here they are.
But I will just read you some things from her letter, because this, I think, is perhaps one of the most remarkable letters that I have ever read.
And the editor at Penguin said we had to have the complete letter on display.
This is the letter basically that broke Krauss, Klaus Fuchs and as we turn over the page of Klaus Future's letter.
And eventually, we will look at it. We can see the effect it had on him.
So she's writing to him. I'm writing to you in front of our sitting room fire where we so often talked about so many things.
This is a hard letter to write. Perhaps even a harder one to read.
But you know me well enough not to expect me to mince my words. I'm taking it all much easier than everybody else,
because my Russian childhood and youth taught me not to trust anybody and to expect anyone and everyone to be a communist agent.
Twenty years of freedom in England softened me, and I learnt to like and trust people or at any rate,
some of them, I certainly did trust you even more.
I considered you the most decent man. I knew I'd do that even now.
That is the reason why I am writing to you. Do you imagine yourself as class folks now?
I mean, you're in the ring being hit from both sides?
Do you realise what will be the effect of your trial on scientists here in America, especially in America,
where many of them are in difficulties with the McCarthy witch hunts, which were only then just beginning?
Do you realise that they will be suspected not only by officials, but by their own friends?
Because if you could, why not they?
For your cause, you didn't have to be on such warm personal relations with them to play with their children and dance and drink and talk.
You are such a quiet man you could have kept yourself much more aloof. You are enjoying the best of the world you were trying to destroy.
It is not honest. He had sort of made out to Rudy Pyles when he visited him that he was not wanting to reveal any of his contacts because,
you know, he didn't want to give any names away, that wasn't the sort of thing that was done.
And she just has nothing to do with this clause. Don't be a child.
This is the schoolboy code of honour. Impressions don't matter.
You personally do not matter. The issues are too important for that.
And you know it. Otherwise, you would have taken the easy way out to take your life.
Thank you for not doing that. You could not leave all this terrible mess for others to sort out.
This is your job class. Then she ends, Oh class, my tears are washing away the ink.
I was so very fond of you, and I so much wanted you to be happy.
And now you never will be. So Klaus Fuchs has received that letter.
And then he continues writing his letter from the third paragraph on.
And I just highlight at the very end, he writes this sort of piece and sorry, I haven't got anybody to type this for me.
I hope you can read it. And don't worry if you don't see the tears, I have learnt to cry again and to love again.
OK for class. And the next thing that he did was then he contacted me five people and gave them the information about his Russian contacts in America.
Carefully people who he knew were already either out of reach and so forth.
But nonetheless, uh, Jenny Paul's letter, I think, had a huge effect upon the course of history and classes.
Original is here in the modelling, and you can look at it on the visualiser afterwards.
So moving towards the end, you know, what happens next?
Well, the fallout for this whole business, if that's the right metaphor, we're sort of very interesting.
It turns out the class folks had been nominated for Fellowship of the Royal Society by Rudy Pyles, and immediately they withdrew the nomination.
As you can see, see up there, uh, as you know, I proposed last year Dr. Kay Folks for election to fellowship.
The proposal was seconded by Dr. Sir John Cockcroft in view of what has happened since then.
I feel I should now withdraw the proposal. I have no reason for changing my opinion of the scientific qualifications.
But the statement, which forms part of our certificates that, in our view,
he deserves the honour of being elected a fellow can no longer be maintained and the sector of the Law Society says many thanks.
Steps to withdraw the certificate will be taken at once, so that was the end of Faulkner's fellowship.
The next letter amongst many that are there on the file of people writing to piles after Fukuda's arrest really brought home to me as a scientist,
how loved Fuchs was in the scientific community and how shocked everybody was and how much they
realise that the pyles family in particular had been completely undermined by what had happened.
The letter I'm now going to show you is from Bill Penny, who was in charge of the British Atomic Bomb Project, a project that was totally secret.
Only a handful of people knew about it, let alone the fact that Klaus Fuchs was in secret the consultants to penny on the British atomic bomb.
The British atomic bomb was completely an open book in Moscow, thanks to Fuchs.
Anyway, Bill Penny is now writing to piles, and I just wanted to bring out the facts.
You know, this was the era I said where you wrote your dear piles, dear piles and look at this letter, my dear Rudolph.
This is that speaks volumes on this occasion. Um.
This nasty business is now over, and I hope that the effects will not last too long.
I thought I would like to send you a short note saying something which I find very difficult to express.
What I am afraid is that the effect of one man's mistakes may smear others.
You can rely on me to do everything that I can to prevent that happening.
Best wishes to Jenny. Sorry, I know that that is the wrong spelling. In fact, Rudolph is felt wrong as well.
It should be, if not all the left on the right is just there for interest.
In 1950 to Britain eventually exploded its own atomic bomb.
The design being the one that Fuchs has helped them make was the very same design that the Russians use because folks shared it with everybody.
And this enigma letter from Bill Penney is that the bomb has been tested.
Tiles is written and congratulated. I am very pleased to get your letter.
Everything went well, and we have some most interesting results. If you know what this is about, it is about, if you don't, you don't.
That was very nice. So I will come to the end with the tragedy of all of this.
Fuchs is arrested. He sent to jail for 14 years, is released in 1959 after nine years for good behaviour.
Rudy Pyles is alerted to the fact that Fuchs is about to be released, and he sends him a letter.
And indeed, we've got the carbon copy on the front table.
The A-Class I see from the papers, you are soon going to be released if you need any help in getting started in life,
financial or otherwise, or if you need advice, please let me know.
I will do what I can. You often see piles. There was no response.
There was no contact between folks and the piles, as for the rest of either of their lives.
Folks maintain contact with some of the other scientists in the UK,
even with the high level security officer who had been instrumental in his exposure and arrest, but he was unable to maintain contact with the pilot.
And I think this is the nearest we get to really understanding the effect of Jenny's letter.
That was the moment when folks felt shame. And I think he could not face the piles.
And I think this is a real tragedy. There was no contact for the rest of their lives.
Klaus Fuchs lived in East Germany. He died in 1988. Junior died in 86.
Rudy in 1995. Rudy lived to his beyond his 80th birthday,
I thought I would end with one other little note that I found in the body in here we could have slipped by,
but it seemed rather appropriate for today. I mentioned Brian Flowers.
He was the very junior member of the theory group at Harwell.
He eventually became fuU successor as the head of the theory group at Harwell,
and it was quite ironic that they spent two years before they would make the decision who who was going to be the successor of folks.
Given all of that happened, it had to be somebody who was beyond reproach.
And the newspapers were very happy because they pointed out that clearly Brian Flowers is beyond reproach because his father was a parson.
The fact that Felix's father had been a parson was not noticed.
Anyway, it was Brian Flowers had a stellar career.
It is also ironic and as I say in the book here, if folks had kept his mouth shut and not confessed.
We would never have known any of this because the only evidence they had against him was the cracked Russian codes.
That was such a sensitive secret you could never be used.
They had to catch folks in the act of spying or have him confess, and he confessed if he hadn't confessed.
He would have become a fellow of the Royal Society, he would become the chief scientist at Harwell,
he would have become the father of the British atomic and hydrogen bombs. He would be in the House of Lords, along with Jeffrey Archer and others.
But he wasn't brought flowers, of course, within the House of Lords.
And Brian married Mary, the former wife of As Deputy Brian and Mary became great friends, as always with the piles.
And there's this delightful note sent to piles on his 80th birthday.
At four school years, one should not think about the dishes in the sink or when to start up a machine which may be full before they're clean.
Away with all such foolish doubt, just lick some plates and throw it out.
But should these not prove taxing tests, throw a party for eight guests with love from Brian and Mary.
Happy Birthday! So there it all is. Thank you very much for this.