Image by Dan Meyers.
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 will have its premiere staged reading on September 9th as a featured presentation of the 50th 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.
It’s program notes speak of it as “an Oppenheimer-adjacent true story,” referring to the film about J. Robert Oppenheimer focusing on his role in the Manhattan Project, which received Academy Awards last year for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director, among other honors.
The first time we see Laurence in Atomic Bill is a few seconds in, the character described as “mid-50’s, arrogant, argumentative, dismissive…” He watches podcaster Jessie Keever (a tip-of-the-theatrical hat to Beverly Keever) based on Libbe as she announces on the show, “There will be a big rally in New York across from the United Nations in support of the U.N.’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon….I’ll be speaking there and, leading up to it, on the show, I’ll address that timeless question: How do you hide an atomic bomb in plain sight?”
“You cannot tell that story!” exclaims Laurence—a spectre in her mind.
“It’s high time somebody did,” says Wilfred Burchett—another spectre. He is an Australian journalist and was first reporter to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bombing, eluding the U.S. ban on westerners accessing what is left of the city. Burchett traveled, unescorted, through the destruction “where Hiroshima used to be” and sat in the rubble to write his story famously headlined“The Atomic Plague.” Burchett wrote: “There was devastation and desolation and nothing else.” He exposed the deadly effects of radiation from the bombing that otherwise were being denied by military authorities. It was published in the London Daily Express and picked up for distribution around the world, creating a firestorm of criticism.
On her program, Jessie continues, “I’m going to tell you exactly how this first atomic cover-up happened, what it led to, and how a man you’ve never heard of…”
Laurence interrupts: “No!”
Jessie continues: “…irrevocably changed your life with your knowledge or consent.”
“You can’t stop her,” says Burchett.
Jessie: “…proving that not only is the pen mightier than the sword…”
“I forbid it!” Laurence shouts.
Jessie goes on: “…but that the pen in service to the sword is the deadliest of all.”
And then all hell breaks out.
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.
Jessie follows about how: “The Times offered Laurence’s articles for free to any newspaper that wanted them—which, of course, they all did. Then they published a booklet of the articles as ‘The Story of the Atomic Bomb.’…They sold it for just ten cents, saying it was ‘so every school child across American could afford their own copy.’”
And so our earliest atomic narrative was set in the minds of children.
Interactions between Laurence, Burchett, and Jessie, among others, continue through
the play. They include Edward Teller who worked at the Manhattan Project and led the development of a hydrogen bomb. At one point, Teller says to Laurence, “This atomic bomb we’re making is nothing. The hydrogen bomb will be a thousand times more powerful—2,000 times.”
And it is.
While Laurence and Burchett never met, HaLevy has them confronting each other repeatedly through the script, going at it hammer and tongs over journalistic ethics, moral responsibility, and what constitutes the truth. She weaves surreal encounters between the living, the dead, the imagined, and Jessie’s real world timeline of health challenges, blending fact-based journalism with magical realism as the script explores responsibility, guilt, redemption, and the cost of humanity’s choices. The story veers from gritty realism and despair to moments of otherworldly connection that ultimately lead to hope.
The staged reading of the play at Wilmington College, a school founded by the Religious Society of Friends in 1870 and still Quaker-affiliated, will be in its 400-seat Heiland Theatre and admission will be free.
Tanya Maus, Director of the Wilmington Peace Resource Center said, “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. The character Jessie’s powerful drive to tell the truth about Laurence’s complicity in the U.S. government’s censorship and cover up of the effects of the atomic bombings compels Atomic Bill to finally come to terms with his moral failing as a journalist and citizen of the United States. Jessie thus 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.”
To which I add: This play is so, so, so important.
HaLevy, based in Los Angeles, is already fielding requests for readings and staged reading in Japan, New Mexico, Navajo Nation, Nevada, and Germany, and she has talks lined up about representation of the script to Hollywood. Her hope is for a fully staged production, though she wouldn’t say no to a film offer. “James Cameron is on my radar, as he’s already announced he’s directing a film on the start of the Atomic Age, the same time frame as my script, but I doubt he has the kind of background information it took me years to dig out. I’d love to have a conversation with his people.”
The post Atomic Bill and the Payment Due appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Karl Grossman.