The play’s the thing

Atomic Bill and the Payment Due, Libbe HaLevy’s new play, uncovers a shocking secret of journalistic malpractice and more, writes Karl Grossman

Can a play influence public perception of our shared atomic history enough to shift the conversation away from a presumed nuclear “renaissance” and into a more critical, life-protective examination of what this technology is and could do to us all?

Playwright and podcaster Libbe HaLevy believes it can. She spent 13 years researching and writing that play—Atomic Bill and the Payment Due—which had its premiere staged reading on September 9^th as a featured presentation of the 50^th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College in Ohio.

For 14 years, HaLevy has hosted the podcast Nuclear Hotseat, aired on 20 Pacifica affiliate radio stations throughout the United States and, as its website (NuclearHotseat.com) says, has been tuned into and downloaded by audiences in over 124 countries around the world.

It was while working on a 2012 episode focusing on the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico that she became aware of journalistic irregularities around that event that piqued her interest.

The play is “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.”

That reporter is William Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter at the 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– a position he relished.

Before World War II broke out and the splitting of the atom first occurred, Laurence wrote in the Times about how atomic energy could for mankind “return the Earth to the Eden he had lost.” He witnessed the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945, and wrote the Manhattan Project press release that was distributed afterwards, which claimed only that 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 bitter disappointment. But he did fly on an airplane that followed the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. When the war ended, he wrote articles in the Times glorifying the Manhattan Project and for many years promoted nuclear energy in his stories— ignoring the lethal impacts of radioactivity.

HaLevy sensed a play lurking in the story.

HaLevy has a long background in theatre and playwriting, with more than 50 presentations of her plays and musicals, and multiple awards—most under her previous name, Loretta Lotman.

And she was exposed to the dangers of nuclear energy, having been in a house in Pennsylvania one mile away from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant when it underwent a meltdown in 1979. She had been staying with friends on a badly timed vacation.

HaLevy authored a book about her experience, Yes, I Glow in the Dark! One Mile from Three Mile Island to Fukushima and Nuclear Hotseat, published in 2018. Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Madness and many other books on nuclear technology, has said of HaLevy’s book that it “must be read by all people who care about the future of the planet and their children.”

Of her book, HaLevy has said: “It’s the story of what happened when I found myself trapped one mile from an out-of-control, radiation-spewing nuclear reactor—how it impacted my life, health, sense of self—and what it took to recover. It’s a personal memoir, a guidebook on what the nuclear industry gets away with and how they get away with it, and a directory of resources and strategies with which to fight back. The information ranges from 1950’s Duck and Cover and Disney’s Our Friend the Atom to how I learned to fight nuclear with facts, sarcasm… and a podcast.”

HaLevy recounted in an interview last week that in 2012, with Nuclear Hotseat having begun in the aftermath of Fukushima a year earlier, she read that more than one press release was written about the Trinity Test before the blast, when no one knew exactly what it would do. She called me for more information. She was right: there had been four press releases written by Laurence in advance to cover every eventuality from “nothing to see here” to “martial law, evacuate the state”—a clear violation of journalistic ethics. 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 in it.

Keever was a journalist writing for publications including Newsweek, The New York Herald Tribune and the 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 “was hired by the U.S. War Department in April 1945 to work for the Manhattan Project;” and how his four months of writing “provided most of the material” used by the Times “in devoting ten of its 38 pages on August 7, 1945 to the development of the atomic bomb and its first use on Hiroshima. Laurence was thus a major player in providing many text-based images, language and knowledge that first fixed and molded the meanings and perceptions of the emerging atomic age. But this major player served as a scribe writing government propaganda on a historic issue, rather than as a watchdog adhering to those high principles traditionally espoused by the press in general and the Times in particular.”

Inspired by Keever’s book, HaLevy launched into extensive research on Laurence—a quest made more difficult because he destroyed all his files, papers, correspondence, and calendars, leaving behind only his published articles, four nuclear-themed books, and two carefully manipulated oral histories recorded for Columbia University. But she was looking beyond the known facts to the human, emotional underpinnings of the story. “These events did not happen by themselves,” she said. “There were people, agendas, money and psychology behind the decisions made, and I saw Laurence as the lynchpin in conveying the earliest atomic story. I needed to know: who was this man and how could he do that?”

A play is different than a book— it focuses on human emotions, on drama.

And there is much drama in Atomic Bill and the Payment Due…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

A key scene takes place at a press conference at the Trinity site a month after the test bomb was exploded. It pinpoints Laurence’s decision that betrayed not only Burchett and himself, but all of humanity by steering the public away from the truth about radiation while obliterating Burchett’s story. For HaLevy, this highlights the moment where Laurence—if he ever had a soul —lost it.

But the rewards were immediate. Jessie says: “Laurence is front page in the Times 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.” And he wins a Pulitzer……………………………………………………………………………………….. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/10/12/the-plays-the-thing/