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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name's Thomas Jones. And this week I'm talking to my colleague Deborah Friedel, a contributing editor at the LRB, who has a piece in the

current issue on the Rosenberg trial. It's a review of a book by

Anne Seber called Ethel Rosenberg, A Cold War Tragedy. Hello, Deborah, and thank you very

much for joining me. Hello, Tom. Thank you. So Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple,

were tried for treason in a US federal court in 1951, accused of spying for the Soviet Union.

They were found guilty and executed

two years later. What was it that they were supposed to have done, or what was it they did?

Well, I should say quickly that they weren't actually tried for treason. They were convicted of

conspiracy to commit espionage. But the line about them, I think this is the jurist, Felix Frankfurter,

was that they were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage, but when it came to sentencing,

they were treated as though they had been convicted of treason. And indeed, still in books,

sometimes it will say that they were convicted of treason. But it's not quite right.

So the prosecution argued that they had run a spiring and that one of Julius Rosenberg's recruits was the younger brother of Ethel.

And he had been a machinist during the war at Los Alamos. And the prosecution argued that he had been a machinist during the war at Los Alamos.

And the prosecution argued that he had stolen the secret of the bomb,

as though there were such a thing, like a recipe in a drawer,

how to make an atomic bomb,

...