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11. The Mom Who Stole the Blueprints for the Atomic Bomb

The Freakonomics Radio Book Club

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Spies and Novelists Are Not So Very Different

Klaus fux, the german physicist and communist spy, was able to infiltrate the scientific community in london. He later joined the manhattan project in los alamos, new mexico. There he fed atomic secrets to ursula, who relayed them to moscow giving the soviets a huge boost in the cold war. Ursula had written from earliest childhood, channelling a vivid imagination into her stories of romance and adventure. In many ways, ursula's life had been a fiction, presenting one sort of person to the world while being some one else in reality.

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