Seventy years ago, on Dec. 8, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower
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The stunt largely worked.
Even today, the legacies of Atoms for Peace continue to obscure the violence posed by nuclear development, especially nuclear weapons. This October, the Biden Administration announced a $7 billion investment in “America’s first clean hydrogen hubs.” Its plan to spend
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Eisenhower’s words from 70 years ago reveal just how that logic began. “Against the dark background of the atomic bomb, the United States does not wish merely to present strength, but also the desire and the hope for peace…to devote its entire heart and mind to finding the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.” Nuclear power would be rebranded as an instrument for peace.
Atoms for Peace helped produce the twin images of nuclear power as necessary and the United States as a leader in peace. It also obscured what the quest for nuclear supremacy looked like, as the United States pursued mining elements and manufactured bombs. These processes significantly harmed, and continue to harm, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and poor people around the world.
Between 1944 and 1986, the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), with the help of private mining corporations, extracted some 30 million tons of uranium ore from Navajo lands, much of which was used to make nuclear weapons. This extraction happened through leases with the Navajo Nation.
But even after the uranium mines closed in 1986, the legacy of this extraction continues. Several studies have shown that
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The Manhattan Project also set its eyes on uranium in the Belgian Congo. In 1945, the Shinkolobwe mine
When Congo gained independence from Belgium a year later, however, the reactor became a national security problem, as a civil war between opposing factions quickly turned into a bloody proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. That summer, the AEC
Nuclear bomb testing caused widespread suffering during the Cold War. Between 1951 and 1992, approximately
The U.S. government understood what it was doing. The Federal Radiation Council published a 1962 report that concluded “any radiation is potentially harmful…it is virtually certain that genetic effects can be produced by even the lowest doses.” Yet, the U.S. conducted 824 tests after the report’s publication—most at the Nevada Test Site, others in the Pacific, a few in midwestern states, and three in the South Atlantic.
As bomb testing became more frequent and the mining of elements more extractive and destabilizing, the U.S. government
In Japan, such operations were more pronounced, which was no coincidence. The first country in the world to be bombed by nuclear weapons in war had to be convinced that the U.S. and nuclear energy were agents of peace. As one Pentagon official put it in 1953: “the atomic bomb will be accepted far more readily if at the same time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends.”
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As such, the CIA and the National Security Council
Americans received similar messages. In the 1960s, U.S. scientists, parts of the anti-war movement, and workers calling attention to nuclear reactor accidents began protesting nuclear development. Amid rising anti-nuclear sentiments, the Department of Defense established the Sandia Atomic Museum in Kirtland Air Force Base in 1969. The museum initially
Over the years, activists and advocates sought to bring the harms associated with nuclear development to the surface and periodic nuclear accidents brought bad press. Public support for nuclear energy, however, has risen
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And yet, harm endures. In the U.S.
Eisenhower’s speech 70 years ago offered a defense and disguise for extractive mining, bomb testing, and state-sponsored deception that harmed people across the globe time and again. In the name of peace, it dramatically expanded the nuclear arsenal of the U.S. in size and scope. As Navajo Nation President Nygren notes, examining this hidden history—and uncovering the legacy of Atoms for Peace—illuminates how we must repair “all those impacted by the harms of the nuclear age” for a more substantive sense of justice and peace in the remaining decades of the 21st century.
Tommy Myung Geun Song is a Ph.D student in History at Yale University. He studies the global history of American social thought with a focus on Indigenous, colonized, and racialized peoples. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians.