Theodore Hall

Theodore Hall (born October 20, 1925, Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, U.S.—died November 1, 1999, Cambridge, England) was an American-born physicist and spy who during World War II worked on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb and also delivered details on its design to the Soviet Union.

An extremely precocious youngster, Hall graduated from high school in Queens at the age of 14. He was deeply affected by the rise of fascism in Europe and by the socialist sympathies of many members of New York’s immigrant Jewish community. While still a teenager, he joined his older brother in changing their surname from Holtzberg to Hall in an effort to escape anti-Semitic prejudice in the professional world. Though he passed the entrance examination for Columbia University in Manhattan, he studied at Queens College and then transferred to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, eventually graduating with a degree in physics at the age of 18. Following the recommendation of a college professor, in January 1944 he reported to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he became the youngest person to work on the Manhattan Project.

Hall’s team designed an implosion device that would initiate the explosion of the plutonium core of the atomic bomb. The design was tested successfully in the first explosion of an atomic device, code-named Trinity, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. By that time Hall had contacted Saville Sax, a college roommate who had connections in left-wing politics. The two arranged a meeting with an agent of Soviet intelligence in New York City, where Hall handed over details on the organization of work at Los Alamos. In subsequent deliveries, mediated by Sax or a Soviet agent, Hall handed over technical details that contributed directly to the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, which was tested in 1949.

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After the war Hall left Los Alamos and moved to Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago and worked in a biophysics laboratory. He maintained intermittent contact with Soviet agents for several more years, though it is not known what other information, if any, he passed on to them. In 1951 he and Sax were interrogated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which had received decryptions of communiqués transmitted by the Soviets during the war that incriminated the two. No charges were ever brought against them, however, possibly because the communiqués were not sufficient to support prosecution or possibly because the authorities did not wish to reveal the extent of their decryption efforts.

After his interrogation and the conviction that same year of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Hall severed connections with left-wing political groups, and he and his family moved to New York City. There Hall worked at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research until 1962, when he accepted an invitation to conduct biological research at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. He worked on applications of electron microscopy until he retired in 1984. In the 1990s the U.S. government declassified portions of its postwar decryption program, and Hall’s wartime espionage became known. Hall never described his actions in detail, insisting for the rest of his life that he had acted out of youthful idealism to prevent the United States from holding a monopoly over nuclear weapons.