July 1, 1946. A steam train pulls into did-cott station. A slight,

bespectacled man in well-polished shoes gets out, clutching a copy of the

times. For all the world an unremarkable British gent heading to the office.

But behind those round spectacles is the brain of one of the world's most

eminent atomic physicists and one of the Soviet Union's most valuable spies.

Klaus Fuchs has been a key member of the Manhattan Project that led to the

atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the British American

collaboration of the war years has already started to fracture. How well please?

In the post-war world America is cementing its global dominance and Britain is

under no illusion that it's the junior partner in the transatlantic alliance.

But the former imperial power upon who shores the sun used to never set still has

global ambitions. The British bulldog wants to maintain its bite and building

its own atomic bomb is a priority. It was one thing to decide that

the United Kingdom was going to build its own nuclear weapon. It was another

thing to come up with the money and other resources. It was a third thing to

work out well who was going to work on it and that turned into a serious problem.

Many of the scientists who'd been in the United States got other jobs in the

United States or in the United Kingdom. The Brits are desperate to have

cloud spoons back on their teeth. Having harvested all the secrets he

can from Los Alamos he's returned to head up the theoretic physics division at

Harwell. A British government research centre built at the edge of a small

picturesque village in Oxfordshire. ostensibly the centre is looking into

...