Theodore Hall

For other people named Ted Hall, see Ted Hall (disambiguation).

Theodore Alvin Hall
Hall's ID badge photo from Los Alamos
Born	Theodore Alvin Holtzberg (1925-10-20)October 20, 1925 New York City, USA
Died	November 1, 1999(1999-11-01) (aged 74) Cambridge, England
Cause of death	Cancer
Education	Harvard University University of Chicago
Employer	Manhattan Project
Known for	Atomic spy

Theodore Alvin Hall (October 20, 1925 – November 1, 1999) was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on US efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence. His brother, Edward Hall, was a rocket scientist who worked on ICBMs for the United States government.

Biography

Early Years

Theodore Alvin Holtzberg was born in Far Rockaway, New York City to a devout Jewish couple. His family soon moved to Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan.

While his father struggled to find work during the Great Depression, he changed both his and Theodore's last name to Hall in an effort to avoid anti-Semitic hiring practices.

Hall attended Public School 173 in Washington Heights during the Great Depression and later graduated from Harvard University at the age of 18.

Manhattan Project

Modern-day Los Alamos aerial view

At the age of 19, Hall was the youngest scientist to be recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. While on a vacation in his hometown, New York City, he entered the Soviet consulate and volunteered to pass information on the Manhattan Project to the Soviet government. (After his death, Hall's wife Joan said that he had begun to adopt strong feelings, current at the time, against the possibility of a militarized United States having a nuclear monopoly very early in his time working at Los Alamos.)

Unbeknown to Hall, Klaus Fuchs, a Los Alamos colleague, and others still unidentified, were also spying for the USSR; none seems to have known of the others. Harvard friend Saville Sax and Lona Cohen acted as Hall's couriers. Igor Kurchatov, a brilliant scientist and the head of the Soviet atomic bomb effort, probably used information provided by Klaus Fuchs to confirm corresponding information provided earlier by Hall.

RDS-1

“Fat Man”

Espionage information procured by Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, and to a lesser extent by David Greenglass, led to the first Soviet device, "RDS–1", closely resembling Fat Man, even in its external shape.

Hall, with the help of Sax (who had open communist sympathies), visited New York, where, after some searching, arranged a meeting with a Soviet diplomat. He presented a detailed sketch of the "Fat Man" atomic device to the official, who later transmitted the information to the NKVD using a one-time pad cipher. Hall's code-name was MLAD, a Slavic root meaning "young".

FBI investigation

Until the release of the Venona decrypts in 1980, nearly all of the espionage regarding the Los Alamos nuclear weapons program was attributed to Klaus Fuchs. Hall was questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in March 1951 but wasn't charged. Alan H. Belmont, the number-three man in the FBI, decided that information coming out of the Venona project would be inadmissible in court, as hearsay evidence, and so its value in the case was not worth compromising the program.

Later career

Hall left Los Alamos for the University of Chicago, where he switched to biology. There he pioneered important techniques in X-ray microanalysis. He went to work at Cambridge University in England in 1962. Hall later became active in obtaining signatures for the Stockholm Peace Pledge.

Statements in 1990s

Report on recruiting of Theodore Hall from the Venona project

The Venona project became public knowledge in 1995.

In a written statement published in 1997, Hall came very close to admitting that the accusations against him were true, although obliquely, saying that in the immediate postwar years, he felt strongly that "an American monopoly" on nuclear weapons "was dangerous and should be avoided":

To help prevent that monopoly I contemplated a brief encounter with a Soviet agent, just to inform them of the existence of the A-bomb project. I anticipated a very limited contact. With any luck, it might easily have turned out that way, but it was not to be.

He repeated this near-confession in an interview for the TV series Cold War on the Cable News Network in 1998, saying,

I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as ... as Nazi Germany developed. There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do. The right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly.

Death

On November 1, 1999, Theodore Hall died at the age of 74, in Cambridge, England. Although he had suffered from Parkinson's disease, it was not what ultimately killed him, succumbing instead to renal cancer.

List of Publications

• Dunne, Gerald; Hall, Theodore (1997). "Renormalization in coupled-abelian self-dual Chern-Simons models". Physics Letters B. 392 (1): 123–128. doi:10.1016/S0370-2693(96)01541-9.
• Bent, Garyd; Rasamny, Marwan; Hall, Theodore (1994). "Quantum chemistry and density functional calculations of formyl chloride". Molecular Physics. 82 (4). Taylor & Francis Group: 825–829. doi:10.1080/00268979400100584.
• Steveninck, Reinhard; Steveninck, Margaret; Hall, Theodore; Peters, Patricia (1974). "A chlorine-free embedding medium for use in X-ray analytical electron microscope localisation of chloride in biological tissues". Histochemistry. 38 (2): 173–180. doi:10.1007/BF00499664.
• Normann, Tom; Hall, Theodore (1978). "Calcium and sulphur in neurosecretory granules and calcium in mitochondria as determined by electron microscope X-ray microanalysis". Cell and Tissue Research. 186 (3): 453–463. doi:10.1007/BF00224934.
• Civan, Mortimer; Hall, Theodore; Gupta, Brij (1980). "Microprobe study of toad urinary bladder in absence of serosal K+". The Journal of Membrane Biology. 55 (3): 187–202. doi:10.1007/BF01869460.
• Dow, Julian; Gupta, Brij; Hall, Theodore; Harvey, William (1984). "X-ray microanalysis of elements in frozen-hydrated sections of an electrogenic K + transport system: The posterior midgut of tobacco hornworm ( Manduca sexta) in vivo and in vitro". the Journal of Membrane Biology. 77 (3): 223–241. doi:10.1007/BF01870571.

See also

• Klaus Fuchs
• Saville Sax
• Lona Cohen
• Manhattan Project
• Los Alamos
• J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Atomic spies

External links

• FBI: Memo Prosecution: Disadvantages (1 February 1956)
• "A Memoir of Ted Hall" (by Joan Hall, wife)
• Los Alamos National Laboratory: History: Spies
• Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues: Annotated bibliography for Theodore Hall