How we cite our quotes: Chapter name.(Chapter Number).Paragraph
Quote #7
Then Fuchs handed over what Gold described as "a considerable packet of information."
"I did what I consider to be the worst I have done," Fuchs would say several years later. "Namely, to give information about the principle of the design of the plutonium bomb." (Land of Enchantment.(29).29-30)
That's the thing about most deceptions: They don't feel good. Perhaps it's with the hindsight granted by time and introspection, or maybe he felt bad about it even then, but Fuchs knew that he was committing a betrayal, and a huge one at that.
Quote #8
The Trinity blast was heard in El Paso, Texas, 150 miles from the explosion. The shock wave rattled windows in Silver City, New Mexico, 200 miles from Trinity. People in Amarillo, Texas, 450 miles away, saw the flash.
Newspapers and radio stations all over the region were flooded with calls demanding information. The reporters, of course, had no idea what had happened. But that morning they received a statement from the army—one General Groves had prepared weeks before.
The news went out: "The explosives dump at the Alamogordo Air Base has blown up. No lives are lost. The explosion is what caused the tremendous sound and the light in the sky. I repeat for the benefit of the many phone calls coming in: the explosive dump at the Alamogordo Air Base has blown up." (Little Boy.(32).1-3)
It's kind of incredible that people believed Groves's lie—the Trinity blast was huge. But sometimes people just accept what they're told because they have no way of even conceiving of the truth.
Quote #9
It wasn't lack of passion she was sensing. It was fear. "Fear of exposure," Gold later admitted. "And fear not for myself, but a horror at the thought that the disastrous revelation might come after we had been married for three or four years, with children at home of our own."
Gold could confess, tell her everything. She might stick by him. But the basic problem remained. For most of his adult life, Harry Gold had been a spy for the Soviet Union. Was it really possible to get away with something like that?
"Who knew better than I on what a precarious, tottering house of cards my whole life rested?" (Fallout.(37).5-7)
Lies have a way of building upon themselves until they're so big they're unmanageable. For Gold, the years of deception about his whereabouts and activities grew so huge that there was no way to come clean (at least, not at the time).