The New York Times Reporter Who Brought Us the 'Atomic Age'

The official releases, which appeared under headlines such as "Basic Force of Universe Unleashed," disclosed, among other amazing things, the story of the first atomic chain reaction, the existence of dozens of secret bomb sites, and the test of the new weapon at the Trinity site in July.
Taken together, they chronicled, according to the Pentagon, a "fabulous achievement" and the means to "save thousands of American lives," which would come to be the key official rationale for killing tens of thousands of civilians in Japan.
Newspapers had to rely completely on information from the military. Press coverage amounted to little more than rewrites of War Department documents. But the War Department documents, it turns out, were written not by some military flack, but by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, one of the great names in the history of The New York Times -- William L. Laurence.