The Traitors; The Double Life of Fuchs, Pontecorvo, and Nunn May

London, England: White Lion Publishers Limited, 1974. White Lion Edition [Stated]. Presumed first printing thus. Hardcover. Fair/Fair. 23 cm. 222, illus., sources, index. Includes four black and white illustrations. DJ has some creasing, soiling, and tears. Book has some page darkening/discoloration. Alan McCrae Moorehead, AO, OBE (22 July 1910 - 29 September 1983) was a war correspondent and historian, most notably two books on the nineteenth-century exploration of the Nile, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). During World War II he won an international reputation for his coverage of campaigns in the Middle East and Asia, the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe. He was twice mentioned in dispatches and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. According to the critic Clive James, "Moorehead was there for the battles and the conferences through North Africa, Italy and Normandy all the way to the end. The hefty but unputdownable African Trilogy, still in print today, is perhaps the best example of Moorehead's characteristic virtue as a war correspondent: he could widen the local story to include its global implications." And James further affirmed, "His copy was world-famous at the time and has stayed good; he was a far better reporter on combat than his friend Ernest Hemingway." Moorehead's 1946 biography of Montgomery also remains well considered - "Moorehead was well able to see - as Wilmot calamitously didn't - that Eisenhower was Montgomery's superior in character and judgment." In September 1945, a young cipher clerk at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa decided to defect to the West. His action ultimately led to the arrest for espionage of three very different men, Klaus Fuchs, Allan Nunn May, and Bruno Pontecorvo. What was it in their backgrounds and personalities that led these men--all of them brilliant and highly respected physicists--to sell atomic secrets to a foreign power? The author suggests some explanations in this book. This is derived from a Kirkus review: A highly intelligent introduction to the three atomic traitors Allan Nunn May, Klans Fuchs and Doctor Bruno Pontecervo, which is not just an airing of the facts in their cases- fascinating as they are, but an inquiry into the moral content of their treason, the political climate which prompted it, and the concept of loyalty and freedom, such betrayals jeopardized. These three, educated men rather than mercenaries and professionals, directed by a sense of a mission however misguided, present a curious study in personality: Allan Nunn May, an unremarkable little man who was a senior reader in physics at King's College London, at the time of his arrest, but prior to that had been an active informer in Montreal; Klaus Fuchs, detached, shy, serious, a scientist of international standing at the British atomic center in Harwell, and a man whose conscience led him to turn over his knowledge of the uranium bomb, the plutonium bomb and its detonating lens, to the Russians; and finally Pontecervo, also at Harwell, charming, sociable, whose happy-go-lucky holiday in Europe with his family preceded a final disappearance behind the Iron Curtain. An exiting interrogation into character and conduct, handled with style and a speculative thoughtfulness.