Organizing the “unknown subject”: Los Alamos, espionage, and the politics of biography

Abstract

This essay uses post‐structuralist theory to analyze cultural discourse about nuclear espionage, focusing on the case of Klaus Fuchs as depicted in Robert Chadwell Williams' 1987 biography, Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy. For a variety of reasons, modernist biography is often frustrated in the attempt to depict subjects as unique and coherent individuals. Biographies of Los Alamos spies are shaped by intertextuality, in which their subjects continually recede before a conflicting documentary record of reminiscences, interrogation and trial transcripts, and popular culture images. Accordingly, biography offers a discursive opportunity for post‐Cold War audiences to meditate on and perhaps transform the political processes by which the contingencies surrounding Los Alamos spies and nuclear weapons technology are resolved as truth claims. Implications of this case for post‐Cold War culture and the ongoing Wen Ho Lee scandal are briefly noted.

Key words:

• biography
• espionage
• Cold War culture
• nuclear weapons
• post‐structuralism
• intertextuality
• Klaus Fuchs