Now It Can Be Told

He had the story of his, or any newsman's life--but he couldn't write it. There he was, sitting in a Superfort, with arc-welder's glasses to protect his eyes from the glare, watching the atomic bomb bore down on Nagasaki. But able, sad-faced William L. Laurence's lips were sealed. He was the Army's guest.

Bill Laurence has known more about the atomic bomb, at every stage of its development, than any other reporter. A topnotch newsman for the New York Times, he had watched, and ably reported, almost every big science story for 15 years. An intense, untidy little man with odd habits (he spent hours placing mirrors just-so in his apartment, so that no matter where he stood he could look out on Manhattan's East River), Laurence showed up at the Times pretty much when he pleased. He thought up his own assignments, often spent weeks on one story. In 1937 he won the Pulitzer Prize. In the days when atom-splitting was no secret, Laurence wrote the most complete story of Uranium 235. (The story goes that anyone who later asked for his prewar atomic article at any U.S. public library was followed home by the FBI.)

When the Army had its atom bomb ready, it commandeered Laurence to write the official releases which explained the bomb. He watched the famed July 16 experiment in the New Mexico desert. Then the Army packed him off to the Pacific, to fly over Nagasaki. Last week, at last, the Army released his account of the Nagasaki raid. Thirty days after it happened, it was still top page-one news in the New York Times, and in many another paper.

Wrote Laurence, of the deathly bloom that rose from Nagasaki: "A giant ball of fire rose as though from the bowels of the earth . . . [then] a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shooting skyward. ... At one stage [it] assumed the form of a giant square totem po'le, with its base about three miles long. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white. . . . Then, just when it appeared as though the thing had settled down, there came shooting out of the top a giant mushroom that increased the height of the pillar to a total of 45,000 feet. The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, sizzling upward, a thousand Old Faithful geysers rolled into one."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.