As hundreds of scientists from around the world were conscripted in the Manhattan Project during the thick of Word War II, the best and brightest were passed along to the top-secret research site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the secrets of the world’s first atom bomb would soon be unlocked.

Though the US Army heavily patrolled the site and sensitive documents were kept under lock and key, Los Alamos was far from leak proof. The researchers themselves, highly prized for their brilliance and unique areas of expertise, could not be explicitly ruled out of service due to any supposed political leanings. Even the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer, was known to keep company with known Communists and under surveillance by the FBI during his involvement in the project.

Meanwhile, another Los Alamos team member, theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, while a staunch anti-fascist, had been a member of the Communist Party in his native Germany. After fleeing to Britain to escape the Nazis, he was loaned out to the Manhattan Project in 1943 and, in short order, became a valuable asset to the team. To this day, Fuchs is credited with several key calculations that would prove essential to making the bomb a reality.

After the project disbanded in 1946, however, Fuchs switched sides and spent the next two years passing secrets to Soviets that included a method for refining uranium and diagrams for the construction of a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency was projecting that the Soviets would be incapable of going nuclear until the mid-1950s. When the USSR conducted their first successful atomic test in 1949, a stunned President Truman initially declared that the explosion must have been an “accident.”

Fuchs was exposed the following year after US Intelligence decrypted messages implicating him as a traitor. He confessed immediately, leading to a rash of similar revelations from other Los Alamos workers. An Army corporal who worked the base, David Greenglass, revealed that he too sold secrets to the Soviets, including schematics of Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. In strange confluence of events, he was able to receive a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against his own sister and her husband — who happened to be none other than Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Both were found guilty and executed, sparking one of the opening salvos of the Cold War and leading to a controversy that lingers to this day.

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