Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  Biblical rhythm and gravity would nevertheless have an influence on his development as a writer. So, too, would the experience of growing up in a repressive political system. His nose was permanently squashed from having been hit by the butt of a soldier’s rifle. When he was seventeen, he threw bricks at policemen during an uprising against the Russian czar and was forced to flee. His mother smuggled him to Berlin inside a pickle barrel, and he eventually booked passage to America, home of the airplanes and radio that he had read about. Laurence had also read about the planet Mars and harbored a secret ambition to build an airplane capable of flying to the red planet, where he could perhaps learn “the secret to life.” He told almost nobody about this boyhood dream until near the end of his life.

  He painstakingly started to learn English at night, by comparing two translated versions of Hamlet. Shortly thereafter, he changed his name from Leid Sieu to William Laurence. His first name, he said later, was in honor of Shakespeare, and the second was for the peaceful suburban street in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he settled. After winning an academic scholarship to Harvard, he studied both chemistry and drama and managed to land a job as a science writer at the New York Times in the days following the stock market crash of 1929. He stood out in the newsroom not only for what an editor called “an unquenchable, boyish enthusiasm for his job,” but also for his deferential approach to scientists and the overcooked language he sometimes used to describe them. He was a short man with tall hair (a fellow reporter described him as “gnome-like”) and an earnest but amiable demeanor that served him well in the environments in which he thrived. Laurence learned the journalist’s trick of putting scientists at ease by asking an erudite question up front, letting the scientist believe that he was in the presence of a serious inquirer and not a dolt. This paid dividends: He wrote the first front-page story in Times history about a mathematical proof. In 1937, he shared in a Pulitzer Prize.

  The defining day of his life may have been February 24, 1939, when he went uptown to hear an informal talk at Columbia University. Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr had just revealed the possibility—by then, it was the inevitability—that a mass of uranium-235 could undergo a chain reaction if a neutron struck it. Laurence had already written about the discovery in an unbylined story for the Times headlined VAST ENERGY FREED by URANIUM ATOM; HAILED AS EPOCH MAKING. The story had created a sensation, and Laurence wanted to follow up. He met the two in Room 403 of Pupin Hall, and the scientists chalked some sketches for him on the blackboard. He had heard the phrase chain reaction several times before, but this time it triggered in him a particularly vivid image, an epiphany not unlike the one experienced by Leo Szilard on a London street corner: a trillion trillion neutrons set loose in a nanosecond.

  Laurence left the meeting in a daze. That night, he and his wife took their pet dachshund, Einstein, for a walk along the East River, underneath the stone footings of the Queensboro Bridge. Laurence was in a spooky mood, more remote than usual. The strange feeling from seeing that sketch on the blackboard was still with him. His wife, Florence, remembered him saying, as if in a dream, “A single bomb could destroy the heart of any city in the world. And the nation that gets it first may dominate the world.”

  From that point forward, Laurence dedicated his career to this one overarching topic; as he later put it, he became a “journalistic Paul Revere” in the name of the potential energy source within uranium. His enthusiasm was mingled with a dread that the Nazis would find the secret first. He recalled, years later, that “the world soon became for me one vast Poeesque pit over which a uranium pendulum was slowly swinging down, while the victim remained unaware of his danger.”

  The flattering tone he reserved for theoretical physicists took on even more priestly coloring. At Harvard, Laurence had once aspired to write plays, and he maintained a lifelong membership in the Dramatists Guild of America. His taste for the theatrical—as well as, perhaps, a long-repressed sense of religious awe—now found full voice in his descriptions of the new field of atomic power. In a freelanced story for the Saturday Evening Post titled “The Atom Gives Up,” he called Lise Meitner’s accidental splitting of uranium “a cosmic fire” and “one of the greatest discoveries of the age,” which would lead to “the Promised Land of Atomic Energy.”

  The article was not all puff: It contained a cogent description of fission before most scientists fully understood what was happening inside uranium. Laurence had a genuine talent for conceptualizing the more recondite elements of physics and through metaphor making them seem easy for his lay readers (though this, too, could go astray: He once described uranium as “an atomic golf course” on which professors were shooting balls of neutrons). He told his colleagues that the job of a science writer was to “take fire from the scientific Olympus, the laboratories and universities, and bring it down to the people.” In a less grandiose moment, he talked of himself as a bee, moving pollen from flower to flower in order to “fertilize ideas.” By 1940, reporters at the Times had started calling him “Atomic Bill.” In the parlance of newsrooms, Bill Laurence had become a home-teamer, or a “homer”—one who had started to ape, consciously or not, the same language, mannerisms, and values of the people he covered.

  The marriage became formal in the spring of 1945, when he received a visit from General Leslie Groves, who came to the third floor of the New York Times to make him a surprise offer. Laurence would be made a “special consultant” on a secret project then under way to harness exactly the same powers that he had been writing about. His primary job would be preparing the first U.S. government statements after the bomb was detonated over an enemy city. In return, he could have nearly unlimited access to the project on behalf of the Times, under the condition that Groves be given censorship power over the articles. They would also be stored in a military safe and stamped TOP SECRET until the end of the war. Fearing leaks and worried about the initial reactions of, as he called them, “crackpots, columnists, commentators, political aspirants, would-be authors, and world-savers” to the slaughter that was to come, Groves wanted a journalist with the credibility of the Times to shape America’s first learnings about the bomb. It doubtlessly helped Laurence’s case that he had a vision of uranium that approached the biblical. If his managing editor, Edwin James, had any misgivings about his science correspondent being on retainer to the War Department, they were not recorded. Laurence’s dual-job status remained a secret both at the Times and to its readers until August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing.

  “You will, for all intents and purposes, disappear off the face of the earth,” Groves told him. That was just fine with Laurence, who later bragged that he was the one man in the country who knew so much about uranium that Groves was left with the option of either shooting him or hiring him.

  Having surrendered his independence for the story of a lifetime, Laurence departed that spring for a private office at Oak Ridge, where the contents of his wastebasket were burned every night for security reasons. The men who collected these papers were, as he called them, “Tennessee hillbillies” who had been selected for the task because they couldn’t read or write. Laurence’s photo ID card gave him the same privilege and access as a colonel. He was taken on tours of Hanford and Los Alamos and introduced to the scientific team, many of whom he already knew from his coverage at the Times. He flew thirty-five thousand miles and had “seen things no human eye had ever seen before—that no human mind before our time could have conceived possible. I had watched in constant fascination as men worked with heaps of uranium and plutonium great enough to blow major cities out of existence.” One day at Los Alamos, he had a close-up experience with the object of his fascination, much like that of Otto Frisch, who had wanted to pocket the first samples of pure uranium he was shown. Laurence wandered into the lab of Robert R. Wilson and found a pile of metal cubes on a table. He thought they looked like zinc.

  “What’s this?” he asked, casually picking one up.

  “U-235,” s
aid Wilson, equally as nonchalant.

  “I looked at the pile,” recalled Laurence. “There was enough there to wipe out a city, but the fact that it was cut up into little cubes, separated here and there by neutron absorbers, kept the mass from becoming critical. . . . I hadn’t believed there could be that much U-235 in existence.”

  All he could think to say at that moment was a banality—“My heavens!” —and Wilson quickly led him into the next room for a cup of tea.

  Laurence was later allowed to see and touch Little Boy, the warhead into which this uranium would be packed, and it inspired him even more. “Being close to it and watching as it was fashioned into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one somehow crossed the borderline between reality and non-reality and felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural,” he wrote.

  He had a seat on the Jornada de Muerto (a name that pleased him) when the Trinity bomb was set off. Laurence grabbed a pencil and started writing about it in the only way he knew—as a highly stylized news story, albeit one that could not be immediately published. His account sounds like a hymn, and in a way, it was. For Laurence, it was the nearest thing he experienced to religious ecstasy.

  The atomic age began at exactly 5:30 mountain war time on the morning of July 16, 1945, on a stretch of semidesert land about fifty airline miles from Alamogordo, New Mexico, just a few minutes before dawn of a new day on that part of the earth. . . . The atomic flash in New Mexico came as a great affirmation to the prodigious labors of scientists during the past four years. It came as the affirmative answer to the, until then, unanswered question “Will it work?” With the flash came a delayed roll of mighty thunder, heard, just as the flash was seen, for hundreds of miles. The roar echoed and reverberated from the distant hills and the Sierra Oscura range nearby, sounding as though it came from some supramundane source as well as from the bowels of the earth. The hills said yes and the mountains chimed in yes. It was as if the earth had spoken and the suddenly iridescent clouds and sky had joined in one affirmative answer. Atomic energy—yes. It was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements, fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great forebodings.

  The Trinity blast, to Laurence, was “the first cry of a new-born world,” which inspired some of the Nobel Prize winners on hand to dance and shout like pagans at a fertility rite. He compared the mushroom cloud to “a gigantic Statue of Liberty, its arm raised to the sky, symbolizing the birth of new freedom for man.” He also observed: “It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though one were present at the moment of creation when God said, ‘Let there be light.’ ”

  This last biblical invocation was among his favorites. Laurence never met a classical allusion that he didn’t like, or attempt to employ. He drew frequently from Greek mythology, particularly the story of Prometheus, the renegade god who brought fire down to earth. Another preferred trope was the scientist as Moses, leading all of civilization to a “land of milk and honey” where Arctic snow was melted before it could touch the ground and disease was a hobby of the past. Metaphors from the Pentateuch came naturally to him, but one that he conspicuously neglected would become a favorite of later critics of the atomic program: that of the tree of knowledge, where man ate and was sorry for it.

  Among science writers, Laurence may well have been the worst prose stylist of his generation. His writing was arid and chilly, even though it was packed with more flourishes than a romance novel. Uranium was to Laurence, at various points, “a cosmic treasure house” and a “philosopher’s stone” or a “Goose that laid Golden Eggs,” which “brought a new kind of fire” that led to “the fabled seven golden cities of Cibola.”

  These messianic word-pictures of a life to come, though wildly overoptimistic, helped create in the American public a generally positive and hopeful feeling about the dawn of the new atomic age. They also helped to blunt the disquieting sense that the world was about to enter its last days. To the contrary, said Laurence; earth was about to become a paradise. “Man had found a way to create an atmosphere of neutrons, in which he could build an atomic fire more powerful than any fire he had built on earth. With it he could create a new civilization, transform the earth into a paradise of plenty, abolish poverty and disease and return to the Eden he had lost.” Faith in God had begun to desert Laurence when his little white kitten died, but his faith in the rational powers of science was unshakable. H. G. Wells could not have created a character more thoroughly sold.

  The major disappointment of his war experience was missing the Hiroshima explosion. His flight from San Francisco to the Pacific island of Tinian, the final staging area for the mission, was delayed because of weather, and he arrived in time for only the final briefing, too late to get a seat on the bomber. But he played a major role nonetheless. He wrote the U.S. government’s announcement of the atomic bomb, delivered by President Harry S. Truman on August 6, 1945.

  “Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution,” Laurence said later. “No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.”

  An early draft had been rejected. Laurence had been in full rhetorical flower, describing a “new promised land of wealth, health and happiness for all mankind,” but an adviser to the president found it “highly exaggerated, even phony,” and the White House opted for a more sober version in which Truman identified the bomb as merely harnessing “the basic power of the universe.” Laurence’s articles about the inner workings of the Manhattan Project were handed out that same day to newspapers both in America and abroad. In most cases, they were simply run verbatim. The public devoured the news about “Mankind’s successful transition to a new age, an Atomic Age.” Almost every fact and coloring the world absorbed in those first hours had come from the pen of Bill Laurence.

  Near the end of his life, he recalled his flight toward Nagasaki as the sole journalistic observer of the second atomic bomb drop—an event he later described as the culmination of his career. He was sitting in his seat in the B-29, gazing out over a pure “endless stretch of white clouds” over the Japanese islands. At the time, the target city was Kokura, which was changed at the last minute to neighboring Nagasaki due to inclement weather. Kokura would be saved by a cloud pattern. Laurence nonetheless contemplated its destruction from an Olympian loftiness, with a certain amount of mad joy. He said:

  It was early morning; it was dark and I was thinking of the town of Kokura being asleep and all the inhabitants having gone to bed, men, women, and children . . . they were like a fatted calf, you know, saved for the slaughter. . . . And here I am. I am destiny. I know. They don’t know. But I know this was their last night on earth. I felt that the likelihood was that Kokura would be completely wiped off the face of the earth. I was thinking: There’s the feeling of a human being, a mere mortal, a newspaper man by profession, suddenly has the knowledge which has been given to him, a sense—you might say—of divinity.

  Laurence had taken the final emotional step of merging his self-consciousness not just with the nuclear weapon (“I am destiny”) riding underneath him but with the godlike powers that it held inside. He could say, without apparent embarrassment, that the sense of being dissolved into the unstable heart of uranium was a feeling akin to that of a rhapsodic worshipper becoming united with the divine through prayer or song. The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, writing with Greg Mitchell, identified this as Laurence’s moment of “immortality hunger” through his association with the bomb. Fission had become his religion.

  The news story he wrote, scribbled on a notepad on his knee, was more restrained in its apocalyptic tone, though no less colorful. The cloud of fire he saw blossoming over the city “was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes . . . creamy white outsid
e, rose-colored inside.” Up to seventy thousand people were incinerated within. The eyewitness account did not run in the Times until nearly a month afterward because of wartime censorship. A reader wrote to say it was the finest descriptive passage outside of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe; Laurence was proud of the comparison and mentioned it in his later years.

  He was not allowed to visit the wreckage of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki to see the effects of what he had touted, having been called home to New York to write a ten-part series for the Times on the creation of the atomic bomb. Laurence did find time, however, to write a lengthy story on September 12 debunking reports that the bomb blasts were associated with deadly levels of gamma rays—a cold scientific fact he almost certainly knew to be true, according to the journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman.

  This public relations crisis was sparked after an Australian reporter named Wilfred Burchett had already dodged a cordon and snuck into the ruins of Hiroshima, where he found thousands of people dying from an unknown wasting disease. His story in the London Daily Express began with these words: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as an atomic plague.” Burchett interviewed Japanese doctors who described what would soon be known as the classic symptoms of radiation sickness: teeth and hair falling out, appetite loss, bleeding from the nose and mouth, festering burns. American officers expelled Burchett from Japan and confiscated all his photographs, but they failed to stop the story from running in Britain.

  The U.S. military moved quickly to squelch all news of radioactivity. There were worries in the Pentagon that the bomb would be compared to German mustard gas in World War I, or other types of wartime atrocities. Laurence was taken on a staged tour of the Trinity site, where he was shown Geiger counters “proving” that no appreciable levels of radiation remained in the area. This was a ridiculous exercise, as the devices would have said nothing about the deadly levels present during the first seconds of the blast. In the first paragraph of a front-page story headlined, sneeringly, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES, Laurence praised this “most effective answer” to “Japanese propaganda.” He quoted Groves as attributing almost every single Japanese death to fire and blast damage. If radioactivity was so dangerous, wondered Groves, then why was grass now growing on the Hiroshima parade grounds?