The Rosenberg trial: at the height of the Cold War 60 years ago, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Did they deserve to die?

• Author: Roberts, Sam
• Position: 1951 - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

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It was billed as the trial of the century. On March 29, 1951, while the United States and the Soviet Union were in the throes of the Cold War, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiring to steal designs for America's atomic bomb and delivering them to Soviet secret agents. Two years later, they were executed in the electric chair, leaving behind two young sons and a nation bitterly divided about the extent of their crimes and whether the death penalty was justified.

"Nothing seemed more important to Americans than that we safeguard the atomic secret from the Soviets," says Doug Linder, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. "This espionage plot was a startling thing."

Growing Soviet Power

Startling because, soon after the end of World War II, America's very survival seemed to be at stake in a cold war that pitted the U.S. and other democratic countries against Communist nations led by the Soviet Union. The Soviets had been U.S. allies in the fight against Germany, but after the war ended in 1945, it became clear that Moscow was intent on taking over vast sections of Eastern Europe and installing Communist puppet regimes (see timeline, p. 18).

In 1948, the Soviets blockaded democratic West Berlin, prompting the U.S. and its allies to launch a yearlong airlift of food and supplies and raising fears that the Cold War would turn hot. By the summer of 1949, Mao Zedong was on the verge of winning his own Communist revolution in China (which he did in October), making the U.S. even more concerned about Communist expansion around the world.

The U.S., however, assumed it had the upper hand militarily because it was the only country in the world with the atomic bomb--which it had used twice against Japan to end World War II.

But on Sept. 3, 1949, a U.S. spy plane cruising off Siberia detected unusually high levels of radioactivity, indicating that the Soviets had abruptly ended America's nuclear monopoly by testing their own atomic bomb. That same month, a five-year-old Soviet message, finally deciphered by U.S. government code breakers, revealed that Russian agents had infiltrated America's secret atomic research program, known as the Manhattan Project (so named because it originated in an obscure office in New York City).

That the industrially backward Soviet Union had developed nuclear weapons just four years after the U.S. did suggested that the Soviets had stolen secrets from America's wartime research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

But how? The investigation triggered by the code breakers led American intelligence agents to a German-born scientist who spied for the Soviets from Los Alamos. He pointed the agents to his courier, a chemist from Philadelphia, who in turn fingered a machinist who had also worked at Los Alamos: On June 15, 1950, the F.B.I. knocked on the door of David Greenglass, a 28-year-old father of two living on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

After being interrogated for eight hours, Greenglass confessed to providing the Soviets with a crude sketch of the bomb and other secrets, beginning in 1944. He also implicated his wife, Ruth, as a courier and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, a City College engineering graduate and Greenglass's partner in a falling machine shop in New York City.

Greenglass testified that he had been recruited to espionage by Julius and by his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg, a housewife caring for two young sons. (Greenglass later told a jury that Julius had given him half of a torn Jell-O carton flap and that...