2024-05-2700:25 Status:Incomplete Tags: Manhattan Project
The speed at which the USSR developed the weapon suggested espionage and communist sympathy. However, given the harsh conditions of the Great Depression, many Americans saw Capitalism as failing, and saw the (seemingly) better conditions of Stalinâs USSR and wanted similar representation of workers, Unionization etc.
This was done by Soviet infiltration of nearly every government department, including: Los Alamos. They had several spies, notably, Klaus Fuchs, who was a crucial physicist in the development of the American Development of the Atomic Bomb. Other scientists would literally give them their children to babysit - that is how much he was trusted. As a German refugee, he knew how awful the Nazi regime was, so he went to the Soviet embassy in the hopes that sharing such a weapon with an ally would help its development. He was able to transfer documents with impunity (including blueprints on Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in the Japanese Bombings).
This greatly accelerated Soviet development of the atomic bomb as on August 29th, 1949 in Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan, the first Soviet bomb was successfully tested. For this, Fuchs confessed and was arrested in early 1950. Harry Gold, a spy courier would get information primarily from Fuchs, then arrested David Greenglass who gave the information regarding the bomb to Julius Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a communist because in America anti-Semitism was very prevalent, and during WWII, the USSR was more involved in combatting fascism, thus was more sympathetic to their cause. Coupled with facing the Great Depression, (a failure of capitalism), he was a socialist. This was taken by the American public to be merely the workings of The Atomic Spy who gave the bomb to the USSR.
The affront to justice against the Rosenbergâs demonstrated that aggression towards communists were clouding their objectivity in giving a fair sentence. They were sentenced to death, on their 14th wedding anniversary.
This sense of Soviet infiltration led underpinned the ensuing McCarthyism that would take place.