William L . Laurence William Leonard Laurence ( March 7 , 1888 – March 19 , 1977 ) was a Jewish Lithuanian - born American journalist known for his science journalism writing of the 1940s and 1950s while working for " The New York Times " . He won two Pulitzer Prizes and , as the official historian of the Manhattan Project , was the only journalist to witness the Trinity test and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki . He is credited with coining the iconic term " Atomic Age " which became popular in the 1950s . Biography . Laurence was born Leib Wolf Siew in Salantai , a small city in the Russian Empire that is now in Lithuania . He emigrated to the United States in 1905 , after participating in the Russian Revolution of 1905 , and he soon changed his name , taking " William " after William Shakespeare , " Leonard " after Leonardo da Vinci , and " Lawrence " after a street he lived on in Roxbury , Massachusetts ( but spelled with a " u " in reference to Friedrich Schiller ' s Laura ) . He attended college at Harvard University , Harvard Law School , and Boston University , and became a naturalized United States citizen in 1913 . During World War I , he served with the U . S . Army Signal Corps , and in 1919 attended the University of Besançon in France . In 1926 he began his career as a journalist , working for " The World " of New York City . In 1930 he began working at " The New York Times " , specializing where possible in reporting on scientific issues . He married Florence Davidow in 1931 . In 1934 , Laurence co - founded the National Association of Science Writers , and in 1936 he covered the Harvard Tercenary Conference of Arts and Sciences , work for which he and four other science reporters received the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Reporting . " Atomic Bill " . In May 1940 , Laurence published a front - page exclusive in the " New York Times " on successful attempts in isolating uranium - 235 which were reported in " Physical Review " , and outlined many ( somewhat hyperbolic ) claims about the possible future of nuclear power . He had assembled it in part out of his own fear that Nazi Germany was attempting to develop atomic energy , and had hoped the article would galvanize a U . S . effort . Though his article had no effect on the U . S . bomb program , it was passed to the Soviet mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky by his son , a professor of history at Yale University , and motivated Vernadsky to urge Soviet authorities to embark on their own atomic program and established one of the first commissions to formulate " a plan of measures which it would be necessary to realize in connection with the possibility of using intraatomic energy " ( no full - scale atomic energy program began in the Soviet Union until after the war , however ) . In April 1945 , Laurence was summoned to the secret Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico by General Leslie Groves to serve as the official historian of the Manhattan Project . In this capacity he was also the author of many of the first official press release s about nuclear weapon s , including some delivered by the Department of War and President Harry S . Truman . He was the only journalist present at the Trinity test in July 1945 , and beforehand prepared statements to be delivered in case the test ended in a disaster which killed those involved . As part of his work related to the Project , he also interviewed the airmen who flew on the mission to drop the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima , Japan . Laurence himself flew aboard the B - 29 " The Great Artiste " , which served as a blast instrumentation aircraft , for the atomic bombing of Nagasaki . He visited the Test Able site at Bikini Atoll aboard the press ship , ' Appalachian ' , for the bomb test on July 1 , 1946 . For his 1945 coverage of the atomic bomb , beginning with the eyewitness account from Nagasaki , he won a second Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1946 . At the office of the " Times " he was thereafter referred to as " Atomic Bill " , to differentiate him from William H . Lawrence , a political reporter at the newspaper . In his autobiography , Richard Feynman mentioned William Laurence standing next to him during the Trinity test . Feynman stated , " I had been the one who was supposed to have taken him around . Then it was found that it was too technical for him , and so later H . D . Smyth came and I showed him around . " In 1946 , he published an account of the Trinity test as " Dawn Over Zero " , which went through at least two revisions . He continued to work at the " Times " through the 1940s and into the 1950s , and published a book on defense against nuclear war in 1950 . In 1951 , his book " The Hell Bomb " warned about the use of a cobalt bomb – a form of hydrogen bomb ( still an untested device at the time he wrote it ) engineered to produce a maximum amount of nuclear fallout . In 1956 , he was present at the testing of a hydrogen bomb at the Pacific Proving Grounds . That same year , he also became appointed Science Editor of the " New York Times " , succeeding Waldemar Kaempffert . He served in this capacity until he retired in 1964 . Death . Laurence died in 1977 in Majorca , Spain , of complications from a blood clot in his brain . Call for revocation of 1946 Pulitzer Prize . In 2004 , journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman called for the Pulitzer Board to strip Laurence and his paper , " The New York Times " , of his 1946 Pulitzer Prize . The journalists argued that at the time Laurence " was also on the payroll of War Department " " and that , after the atomic bombings , he “ had a front - page story in the " Times " disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people . " They concluded that " his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half - century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb " . In their 1995 book " Hiroshima in America : Fifty Years of Denial " , Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell assert , " Here was the nation ' s leading science reporter , severely compromised , not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time . " Laurence denied that the black rain fallout in Hiroshima was significantly radioactive because it originated from the firestorm that began 30 minutes after explosion , when the radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown many miles downwind .