Alan Nunn May

Alan Nunn May (2 May 1911 – 12 January 2003) was a British physicist, and a confessed and convicted Soviet spy, who supplied secrets of British and United States atomic research to the Soviet Union during World War II.

Nunn May was the son of a brassfounder, born in Kings Norton, Birmingham, and educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. As a scholarship student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he achieved a first in physics, which led to doctoral studies under Charles Ellis and lectureship at King's College London.

Nunn May joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s, and was active in the Association of Scientific Workers. Cambridge Five spy ring member Donald Duart Maclean was also at Trinity Hall during an overlapping period.

During World War II, he initially worked on radar in Suffolk, then with Cecil Powell in Bristol on a project that attempted to use photographic methods to detect fast particles from radioactive decay. James Chadwick recruited him to a Cambridge University team working on a possible heavy water reactor. The team was part of the British Tube Alloys directorate which was merged into the American Manhattan Project, the successful effort to create a nuclear weapon. In January 1943 the Cambridge team including Nunn May transferred to the Montreal Laboratory which was building a reactor at Chalk River near Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. His Canadian job ended in September 1945, and he returned to his lecturing post in London.

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