Theodore Alvin Hall

Theodore Hall (from his Los Alamos ID card during World War II)

Copy from the VENONA project (1944)

Theodore Alvin Hall (born October 20, 1925 in Queens , New York , † November 1, 1999 in Cambridge ) was a physicist and collaborator on the Manhattan project in Los Alamos (New Mexico) to develop the first atomic bomb in the United States. He was only exposed as an informant and spy for the Soviet Union in 1995 .

Life

Theodore Hall grew up in New York, where he and his older brother Edward changed the surname "Holtzberg" to "Hall" in the fall of 1936 in order to cover up their Jewish origins against disadvantageous positions. The gifted graduated from high school at the age of 14, graduated from Harvard University at the age of only 18 as part of his physics studies and one year later was recruited as the youngest scientist for the Manhattan project in Los Alamos. After the Second World War , Hall worked as a biologist at the University of Chicago until 1962 , where he published important papers on X-ray microanalysis. From 1962 he worked in England at Cambridge University , where he - marked by Parkinson's disease - died at the age of 74 of complications from kidney cancer.

Historical meaning

While more than forty years after the Second World War it was generally assumed that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist from the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico , who passed on information about the construction of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, only the release was confirmed and publication of the Soviet messages intercepted and decrypted by the secret services of the USA and England in the VENONA project by a second, already suspected spy Theodore Alvin Hall. Its Soviet code name was MLAD. Hall had given the Soviets important material on the implosion method and other aspects of the construction of an atomic bomb in 1944 . His contact person was Lona Cohen . He was suspected as early as 1950, but denied all allegations at the time.

Theodor A. Hall was never convicted, although the betrayal of secrets about nuclear weapons is now considered to be more significant than, for example, the betrayal by the spy couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg , who were executed as members of a spy ring in the United States on June 19, 1953.

Fonts (selection)

• Ratio of cross sections for electron capture and electron loss by proton beams in metals , University of Chicago, Department of Physics. 1950 PhD thesis.
• Theodore A Hall; HOE Röckert; Richard L de CH Saunders: X-ray microscopy in clinical and experimental medicine , Springfield, Ill., Thomas 1972, ISBN 0-398-02458-8 .

literature

• Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel: Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown American Spy Conspiracy. Random House / Times Books, New York 1997.