Trivia
He had married Hilde Broda, the ex-wife of Engelbert Broda, in 1953; they had a son, and a stepson from Hilde's previous marriage. His first name is sometimes spelt Allan with two Ls, but the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopædia Britannica both use Alan.
His arrest and sentence in 1946 first showed publicly that the Soviet Union had obtained atomic secrets by espionage. His clearance by MI5 also led to American distrust of Britain, and the McMahon Act. He passed on information on atomic reactors, but unlike Klaus Fuchs (who was arrested in 1950) he knew little of weapon design.
Nunn May is a major character in the 2003 novel, The Cloud Chamber, by Clare George, a fictional account of Cambridge physicists in the 1930s which centers on the scientific excitement of the interwar years contrasted with the vexing moral questions faced by scientists during World War II. The main character is a fictional physicist and pacifist who studied and worked at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory with Nunn May before the war. George's acknowledged inspiration for the story was her grandfather, a real-life physicist whose true story follows several of the particulars of her character, Walter Dunnachie.
Read more about this topic: Alan Nunn May
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