, Japan On May 5, 1940, Laurence published a front-page exclusive in the
New York Times on successful attempts in isolating
uranium-235 which were reported in
Physical Review, and outlined many (somewhat hyperbolic) claims about the possible future of
nuclear power. He had assembled it in part out of his own fear that
Nazi Germany was attempting to develop atomic energy, and had hoped the article would galvanize a U.S. effort. Though his article had no effect on the U.S. bomb program, it was passed to the Soviet mineralogist
Vladimir Vernadsky by his son,
George Vernadsky, a professor of history at
Yale University, and motivated Vernadsky to urge Soviet authorities to embark on their own atomic program, and established one of the first commissions to formulate "a plan of measures which it would be necessary to realize in connection with the possibility of using intraatomic energy". A
Soviet atomic bomb project got started ; a full-scale Soviet atomic energy program began after the war. On September 7, 1940,
The Saturday Evening Post ran an article by Laurence on atomic fission, "The Atom Gives Up". In 1943, government officials asked librarians nationwide to withdraw the issue. In 1945,
Major General Leslie Groves approached Jack Lockhart, Assistant Director of
The Censorship Office, to serve as press release writer and official historian of the
Manhattan Project. Lockhart turned the role down and instead recommended Laurence. In the spring of 1945, Groves met with Laurence, then aged 57, and later summoned him to the secret
Los Alamos laboratory in
New Mexico to serve as the official historian of the Manhattan Project. In this capacity he was also the author of many of the first official
press releases about
nuclear weapons, including some delivered by the Department of War and President
Harry S. Truman. He was the only journalist present at the
Trinity test in July 1945, and beforehand prepared statements to be delivered in case the test ended in a disaster which killed those involved. As part of his work related to the Project, he also interviewed the airmen who flew on the mission to drop the atomic bomb on the city of
Hiroshima, Japan. Laurence himself flew aboard the
B-29 The Great Artiste, which served as a blast instrumentation aircraft, for the
atomic bombing of Nagasaki. He visited the test
Able site at
Bikini Atoll aboard the press ship
Appalachian, for the bomb test on July 1, 1946. US military encouraged Laurence to write articles dismissing the reports of radiation sickness as part of Japanese efforts to undermine American morale. Laurence, who was also being paid by the US War Department, wrote the articles the US military wanted even though he was aware of the effects of radiation after observing the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and its effect on local residents and livestock. For his 1945 coverage of the atomic bomb, beginning with the eyewitness account from Nagasaki, he won a second
Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1946. Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein has called Laurence "part huckster, part journalist, all wild card ... improbable in every way, a real-life character with more strangeness than would seem tolerable in pure fiction." In 1946, he published an account of the Trinity test as
Dawn Over Zero, which went through at least two revisions. He continued to work at the
Times through the 1940s and into the 1950s, and published a book on defense against nuclear war in 1950. In 1951, his book
The Hell Bomb warned about the use of a
cobalt bomb – a form of hydrogen bomb (still an untested device at the time he wrote it) engineered to produce a maximum amount of
nuclear fallout. In 1956, he was present at the testing of a
hydrogen bomb at the
Pacific Proving Grounds. That same year, he was appointed science editor of the
Times, succeeding
Waldemar Kaempffert. He served in this capacity until he retired in 1964. He received honorary doctorates from
Boston University (
Sc.D., 1946), the
Stevens Institute of Technology (Sc.D., 1951),
Grinnell College (
D.H.L., 1951) and
Yeshiva University (D.H.L., 1957). "It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in act of breaking the bonds that held it down" and "a monstrous prehistoric creature."
Criticisms In 2021, the historian
Alex Wellerstein asserted that Laurence was "willingly complicit in the government’s propaganda project", referring to Laurence's collaboration with the
United States Department of War to produce articles on the atomic bomb, its production and effects. ==Death==