Published: 20 October 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
A documentary showing next week in Australia examines the life of a US nuclear scientist who believed the world would be safer if the US did not have the atomic bomb all to itself.
Theodore Alvin Holtzberg - later known as Ted Hall - was a brilliant mathematician and physicist. So much so that he was plucked from Harvard University at the age of 18 to work under Robert Oppenheimer on the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in the wastes of New Mexico.
But Ted Hall was also a “traitor” who gave away key secrets of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the Soviet Union.
Hall’s “crimes” - with the later acquiescence of his equally left-leaning wife Joan, both of whom had Russian-Jewish pedigrees - are explored in an extraordinary new film, A Compassionate Spy. Directed by Steve James, the film is mainly a documentary but spiced with scenes enacted by talented thespians who bear a striking resemblance to the life-long lovers.
Had either Ted or Joan confessed to the conspiracy, both would have been sentenced to the electric chair like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - the only spies who disclosed American secrets to the Soviets to be executed during the Cold War.
By coincidence, the Halls drove past Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison, north of Manhattan on the shore of the Hudson River, taking their children to a family outing on the day of Rosenbergs’ execution in 1953.
Klaus Fuchs, a fellow physicist - who unknown to Ted Hall was also giving away secrets of the Manhattan Project to the Soviets - had the sense to move to Britain, where a death sentence was much more unlikely.
The premise of A Compassionate Spy is that the then US president Harry Truman had other atomic bombs in preparation to drop on the Soviet Union, which had lost 20 million people helping the West to defeat Hitler.
One of the most chilling graphics in the film shows the targets and the flight paths of the multiple B-29 heavy bombers, similar to the Enola Gay that dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, that were ready to deliver the next atomic warheads.
