By Karl Grossman
Live long enough and more interesting things happen. I received the script last year of a play in which, by name, I’m a character. The play is “Atomic Bill and the Payment Due.”
Next week, on September 9th, it is to have its premiere staged reading as a featured presentation for the 50th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College in Ohio.
It is by playwright and podcaster Libbe HaLevy who spent 13 years writing it. She is already fielding requests for readings and presentations in Japan, New Mexico, Navajo Nation, Nevada, and Germany, and has talks lined up about representation of it in Hollywood and says she wouldn’t say no to a film offer.
HaLevy has a long background in theatre and playwriting with more than 50 productions of her plays and musicals, and multiple awards.
How did I get involved as a character in a play?
The play is described in its program notes as “a true story about media manipulation at the dawn of the Atomic Age and the New York Times reporter who sold his soul to get the story.” The reporter was William Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter at the New York Times
In 1945, General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, arranged with Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Edwin James, its managing editor, to have Laurence secretly inserted into the Manhattan Project. He was the only journalist embedded in the crash program to build the first atomic bombs.
In his four months with it, he witnessed the Trinity test of a nuclear device in New Mexico and indeed wrote for the Manhattan Project its press release claiming that only an ammunition dump exploded and no one was hurt. He had arranged a seat on the Enola Gay for its dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima but missed getting on—a big disappointment. But he did fly on an airplane that followed the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. When the war ended, Laurence wrote articles in the Times glorifying the Manhattan Project and promoting nuclear energy— ignoring the deadly impacts of radioactivity.
HaLevy not only has a connection with theatre but with nuclear technology. She was staying in a house one mile away from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania when it underwent a meltdown in 1979.
She authored a book “Yes, I Glow in the Dark! One Mile from Three Mile Island to Fukushima and Nuclear Hotseat.” For the past 14 years, she has hosted the podcast Nuclear Hotseat, aired on 20 Pacifica affiliate radio stations through the U.S. and, as the program’s website says, has been “tuned into and downloaded by audiences in over 124 countries around the world.”
It was while working on a 2012 episode for Nuclear Hotseat focusing on the Trinity test that HaLevy became aware of journalistic anomalies around that event. She called me for more information. I referred her to Beverly Ann Deepe Keever who had written the book “News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb” published in 2004. Laurence is a main figure. Keever as a journalist wrote for publications including Newsweek, The New York Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor, and for seven years reported on the Vietnam War from the front lines. At the time she wrote “News Zero” she was a professor of journalism at the University of Hawaii.
In “News Zero” Keever detailed “the arrangements” made by Groves with Sulzberger and James at the Times, how Laurence both at it and with the war over in articles for the Times “served as a scribe writing government propaganda” to cover up the “harmful” effects of “atomic bombs, radiation and radioactivity.”
HaLevy then conducted extensive research on Laurence.
A play focuses on human emotions, on drama. And there is much drama in “Atomic Bill.” In it, Laurence interacts with Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, the first reporter to enter Hiroshima after the bombing, traveling unescorted through the destruction “where Hiroshima used to be” and wrote an article headed“The Atomic Plague.” He exposed the lethal effects of radiation there otherwise being denied by military authorities. It was published in the London Daily Express and picked up for distribution around the world.
Articles by Laurence after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared the following month on the front page of the Times, “Atomic Bill” relates, “for two full weeks in September 1945, ten articles, 20,000 words. He coins the term ‘Atomic Age’ but uses the word ‘radiation; only four times, not once mentioning its dangers.”
There are interactions between Laurence and Burchett and also Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and J. Robert Oppenheimer. My character weaves through the play.
The film “Oppenheimer” focusing on his role in the Manhattan Project last year received Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director and other honors. The “Atomic Bill” program notes speak of the play as “’Oppenheimer’-adjacent.”
Tanya Maus, director of the Wilmington Peace Resource Center, says “Libbe HaLevy’s ‘Atomic Bill and the Payment Due’ reveals the way in which individuals become caught up in the powerful forces of governments seeking to produce false narratives to gain public support for nuclear weapons use and development” and leads the audience “to reflect upon its own assumptions about nuclear weapons and nuclear power and their continued destructive impact today on human lives in the United States and throughout the world.”