"Atomic Bill": When Famed Reporter Turned Pro-Bomb Propagandist

New doc explores how the New York Times science writer helped sell the Bomb.

My latest film, “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today” has been airing over PBS stations for the past six months and now via many more early next month. It is also now streaming for free (key links to watch now and more here). A companion book is now available, and you can read more or order here.

Last week, I posted a preview of the upcoming (January 6) PBS “American Experience” airing of the new Ben Loeterman film, “Bombshell.” As I noted, I have been involved for the film from its beginning about five years ago and appear on screen multiple times as a talking head. It explores the U.S. cover-ups and media manipulation that followed the use of the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945, which I’ve been writing about (or filming) for, oh, four decades. Here is the trailer for the film. Let me know if you wish to talk to anyone involved with making it.

Over the next couple of weeks I will publish here excerpts from some of my past reflections on key characters in the film. Today: the Manhattan Project’s embedded reporter-turned-propagandist from The New York Times, “Atomic Bill” Laurence.

Now, what makes William L. Laurence (pictured above with Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie R. Groves) so fascinating and significant? Among other things, this pro-bomb propagandist played a key role suppressing the full truth of radiation dangers (which he had come to know well). He was also the only journalist/publicist to ride along for an atomic bomb-drop, in his case, Nagasaki.

Indeed, Laurence earned the “Atomic Bill” nickname several times over. He was already a Pulitzer-winning New York Times science reporter who became embedded with the Manhattan Project and followed its creation of the first atomic bombs at several sites around the United States. As the first use of the new weapon against Japan neared, eighty summers ago, he wrote several lengthy articles glorifying the Bomb and the men who made it, which were published, with overwhelming impact, by his newspaper (and others across the country) starting on August 7, 1945.

Then, on August 9, he observed the atomic bombing of Nagasaki from one of the support planes, another unique experience denied others. Later he wrote about that for the Times. It expressed wonderment and pride in the death-dealing device, without concern for the tens of thousands of civilians who died below or its startling radiation dangers. The piece, as part of a 10-part series, would earn him another Pulitzer.

Less well-known: Laurence continued his role as chief bomb cheerleader weeks after the Nagasaki bomb exploded.

To that point, U.S. officials had downplayed Japanese casualties in the two atomic cities and largely pooh-poohed Japanese “propaganda” claims on the lingering effects of radiation exposure and accounts of thousands perishing from horrid some new “disease.” But Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett had snuck into Hiroshima to write the first article exposing what he called an “atomic plague.” It sound a lot like the result of now-banned chemical warfare. A U.S. general, Thomas Farrell, had toured the ruins in Hiroshima and wrongly claimed that only a handful died due to radiation effects. Groves privately called the Japanese reports “propaganda” and a “hoax,” and believed that he’d heard that perishing from radiation disease was “a rather pleasant way to die.”

On September 9, 1945—eighty years ago next week—Laurence toured the Trinity test site, in New Mexico, where the United States had tested its first atomic weapon almost two months earlier, with Groves and Oppenheimer. The top-secret area finally had been opened to journalists. (With Oppie om that day, below.)

Two weeks earlier, President Truman’s secretary, Charles G. Ross, had sent a memo to the War Department urging the military to recruit a group of reporters to explore the test site. “This might be a good thing to do in view of continuing propaganda from Japan,” Ross wrote. Oppenheimer agreed to play a prominent role in the junket.

Laurence’s account of this visit (delayed three days until September 12 due to a censorship review) disclosed quite frankly why he and thirty other journalists had been invited: to expressly, almost under orders, to “give lie to” Japanese “propaganda” that “radiations were responsible for deaths even after” the Hiroshima attack, as he wrote. He quoted General Groves calling any deaths by radiation in Japan as “very small.” (In truth, the total was probably 20,000 or more in the two bombed cities.)

General Groves had expressly asked the reporters to assist him in this effort, and they did not disappoint him. Geiger counters showed that surface radiation, after nearly two months, had “dwindled to a minute quantity, safe for continuous human habitation,” Laurence asserted. He did introduce one bit of contrary information: the reporters had been advised to wear canvas overshoes to protect against radiation burns.

But Laurence was keeping a lot to himself. Embedded with the Manhattan Project for months, he was the only reporter who knew about the fallout scare surrounding the Trinity test: scientists in jeeps chasing a radioactive cloud, Geiger counters clicking off the scale, a mule that became paralyzed. Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised—with the aid of Groves and Oppenheimer—not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time. In his report he repeatedly used the word “propaganda” to describe Japan’s claims.

The press tour, in fact, had “an oddly reassuring effect,” the New York Times observed in an editorial.

Watch Laurence talk about his bomb project in this early TV interview:

As a final note: for a brilliant psychological portrait of Laurence, see my book “Hiroshima in America,” where my co-author, the late Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, provides his usual fair and lucid analysis.