Spies Memes

The classic David vs Goliath story, but with nuclear physics! On the left, we have the entire U.S. Army guarding atomic bomb secrets with mushroom clouds and military might. On the right, just one determined British mathematician (Klaus Fuchs) who casually stole those secrets using some fancy math and a camera. Fuchs was a theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project while secretly passing nuclear weapon designs to the Soviet Union. His espionage dramatically accelerated the Soviet nuclear program, proving that sometimes all you need to defeat a superpower is a good understanding of differential equations and zero moral qualms about nuclear proliferation. The intelligence community still uses this as their favorite example of why you shouldn't let brilliant mathematicians near classified information without extensive background checks!