Nitrogen content measured by NRA in diamond nano particles and in the light of these results we evaluate the conversion of nitrogen to nitrogen-vacancy (NV) complexes in both bulk diamond and diamond nano particles after a 2.4MeV-proton irradiation and subsequent thermal annealing. Key words: diamond, color center, nuclear reaction analysis. Single crystal CVD diamond has been grown on (100)-oriented CVD diamond seed in six layers to a total thickness of 4.3 mm, each layer being grown in gas with increasing concentration of nitrogen. concentrations of nitrogen (2 × 1017–1019 cm−3 or ∼ 1–50 ppm, for diamond 1 ppm = 1.8 × 1017 cm−3), and high-purity diamonds grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) with low nitrogen concentration (1014–1017 cm−3 or 0.5–500 ppb). Nuclear reaction analysis (NRA) has been used for the determination of nitrogen content in diamond by monitoring the 14N(d,p0) 15N nuclear reaction from a 1.4 MeV deuteron beam incident on the diamond samples. Results obtained in bulk diamond are compared to those inferred from infrared optical transmission measurements.