Enemy Alien: A True Story of Life Behind Barbed Wire by Kassandra Luciuk & Nicole Marie Burton [cc]

[@jeffcummings4600]

Thanks for sharing this interesting book, Meepelous. It makes me want to share a story of my own about someone else who spent time in Canada in internment camps. Last year, I read the biography of Klaus Fuchs, the famous spy. Today in the USA he is remembered almost exclusively as a spy, but that's misleading. He was a physicist by vocation. His conscience did compel him at one point to share scientific secrets. Fuchs was a promising, young German theoretical physicist, a Socialist and an anti-Nazi activist who had been forced to flee Germany before the war. He fled to the UK and demonstrated his extraordinary abilities in experimental physics. When war broke out, he was detained and interned as were all Germans. The British detained them all together--Nazis, anti-Nazis and Jews--all in the same camp. In the process, some even died. Finally, British physicists involved in the development of the Atomic Bomb were able to convince the UK government to release him and enlist him into their efforts. He was invited to the USA to participate in the Manhattan Project as part of the British Scientific Team. His time in the internment camp had convinced him that the British were not much better than the Germans. He felt, as many of the physicists did, that the power of the atomic bomb should not just belong to one or two nations, so he secretly shared classified scientific information with agents of the USSR. Eventually, he was discovered and arrested. After his conviction on espionage charges, he served 9 years in prison. He was demonized in the USA as a betrayer of the "Free World." Based upon standard protocols in the UK, Fuchs was released on good behavior and returned to East Germany to become an important leader in their Nuclear Energy Program. On August 29th, 1949, Stalin successfully tested his first atomic bomb. Before that date, the USA had utilized the bomb twice on civilian targets. There had been talk of putting the bomb to use again in North Korea, but after the Soviets had their bombs, deterrence kicked in. The US insisted that Stalin's possession of the atomic bomb placed the entire world in danger, but no other atomic or nuclear attacks have been carried out since then by anyone. Could Fuchs perhaps have made the ethical decision?