I don’t know about you, but I would like to think the end of the Cold War ended worries of nuclear conflict. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Talk of nuclear weapons and worry about a nuclear threat pop up frequently in everyday discussions about foreign policy as well as in presidential debates. Scare tactics are everywhere, bolstered by the popularity of Oppenheimer, last year’s film about the development of the first atomic bomb, along with anxiety over the risk of nuclear use by Russia during the war in Ukraine. There’s even chatter about the potential for a nuclear arms race in space.
Today’s Nuclear Worries
This unease isn’t imaginary. According to a 2024 national opinion survey, American voters are increasingly aware and very concerned about the dangers of nuclear weapons. If you’d like to do a deep dive into the poll results you can access them here.
Want to know what you should really be concerned about? The Center for Strategic and International Studies has a good analysis. Here are their top 5 concerns:
- Russia’s Nuclear Threats and the War in Ukraine
- China’s Nuclear Buildup
- Tensions with North Korea and Opportunistic Aggression
- U.S. Extended Deterrence Commitments and Integration with U.S. Allies
- Progress on U.S. Nuclear Modernization
If you’d like more information on each of these topics, make sure to read the article by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Context
Do you ever wonder how we got in this mess, how the nuclear arms race got started?
At the end of World War II, after the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, US nuclear technology was tightly controlled and exports were restricted, even to wartime allies. Nuclear reactors mainly created fuel for warheads, and nuclear power plants and submarines were only in the embryonic stages of construction.
Even so, the US was pursuing nuclear superiority for itself as a wider Cold War strategy. Just over a month before a UN speech, Eisenhower approved a significant expansion in America’s nuclear arsenal, and warhead numbers increased from around 1,100 to more than 18,000 during his presidency. He also considered the potential use of nuclear weapons in conventional conflicts.
Then, on December 8, 1953, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, focusing on his concerns about “atomic warfare.” The speech, later called Atoms for Peace, defined a plan for new forms of international cooperation around nuclear technology and called for “lasting peace for all nations, and happiness and well-being for all men.” You can watch the speech below.
(For the text of the speech click here. https://www.iaea.org/about/history/atoms-for-peace-speech )
Atoms for Peace: 10 Takeaways
Eisenhower’s speech changed everything. Here are eleven takeaways from the speech.
- One of the most visible impacts of the speech was its signaling, both to domestic and international audiences, of a significant change in US policy towards supplying other nations with nuclear science.
- Eisenhower’s speech, and the US sponsored Atoms for Peace program that followed, proposed a sharing of technology and nuclear material with other countries. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets of the speech were printed in ten languages and disseminated.
- The execution of the Atoms for Peace program essentially ignored the basic idea in Eisenhower’s speech, but the program also went down a path that experts had predicted would lead to proliferation.
- The speech called for a UN-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), eventually founded in 1957, to promote peaceful nuclear use while discouraging weapons proliferation. It remains a crucial international entity in nuclear verification, nuclear safety, and promotion of peaceful uses of nuclear technology. Recent responsibilities include monitoring the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant during the Ukraine war.
- The program paved the way for the restrictive US Atomic Energy Act to be revised to allow sharing of technology and building of reactors in different countries. This significantly increased global development of nuclear power and nuclear research for non-military purposes like agriculture and medicine.
- Eisenhower tried to set up an international uranium bank with US and Soviet joint contributions from their stockpiles of “normal uranium and fissionable materials.” These would be contributed to a pool and shared with other countries for peaceful purposes, both to help restrict the arms race and “provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.” However, this bank was never created, partly because of Soviet concerns that it would continue to allow US leadership of nuclear weapons technology. Instead, bilateral agreements were struck to supply nuclear energy and materials.
- Although the Atoms for Peace program was responsible for spreading “peaceful” technology, supplying nuclear reactors and material for energy and civil research, the reliance on bilateral agreements meant that it also became a cold war commercial “weapon. Uranium and technology exports encouraged dependence on selling countries.
- For the Soviet Union, sharing nuclear energy was a way of influencing other countries and creating alliances. Today, Russia’s contracts and construction related nuclear, extend to 54 countries. This activity has remained “largely below the sanctions radar”, while remaining a significant source of international influence for Russia.
- The reactors and technical expertise supplied for civilian energy or research provided crucial foundations for proliferation. For example, in 1957, the US began working with Iran to launch its nuclear program, an endeavor that had its beginnings in the Atoms for Peace. Click here for a timeline discussion of Iran’s program.
- One of the speech’s public legacies was encouraging wider public engagement with the idea of what “nuclear” actually was. This inspired new popular culture. For an introduction to “atomic fever” click here. If, on the other hand, you’re just interested in movies, think “Nuclear Noir.”
Nuclear Noir
I hadn’t heard about Nuclear Noir until I was playing around one afternoon and came across the term on one of my favorite sites, Crime Reads. Here’s what they have to say about the genre:
Noir, both fiction and film, is built on a foundation of fear, and no fear grips us quite like the specter of our world ending at any second in a white-hot blast of nuclear fire. The Cold War had barely started when noir began using nuclear paranoia as a theme and a plot point—sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes as overtly as a shockwave destroying a town. Here are four movies . . . that exemplify the facets of what we might call “nuke noir.”
Here are the movies they recommend:
Notorious (1946)
Notorious (1946) is a Hitchcock film about a
Stray Dogs (1949)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Stray Dogs (1949) is a police procedural that’s fascinating for its depiction of post-war Japan. According to a Roger Moore review, characters in the film start burnishing/rewriting the nation’s history by referring to WWII veterans of the Imperial Japanese armed forces as the “post-war generation.”
Split Second (1953)
A Cold War thriller a
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Kiss Me Deadly begins with private detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) picking up a woman named Christina who is standing on the highway barefoot and wearing only a trench coat. They’re stopped farther on by strangers who knock out Mike and murder Christina. Go to our post on American Film Noir to learn more. The movie’s a genre classic !
The Atomic Age
By the mid 1950s references to all things atomic had pervaded the culture, influencing all aspects of American life: toys, cosmetics, cocktails, housing, art and entertainment. For an overview read Atomic Fever Goes Viral. Satisfy your inner child by reading Toys for the Atomic Age. Love pop culture? Take a look at Pop Culture and the Atomic Age. It’s full of terrific trivia and has lots of entertainment suggestions. Finally, if you’re a music lover, you’re definitely going to want to check out Atomic Rock.
If you love movies you’ll want to check out the Cold War Movie Watchlist. For information about the free download, click here.
Sources:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2968/059006009
https://theconversation.com/eisenhowers-atoms-for-peace-speech-on-nuclear-dangers-has-important-lessons-even-after-70-years-219347
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/49675-yougov-big-survey-nato-war-nuclear-weapons-nuclear-war
https://www.csis.org/analysis/thinking-about-unthinkable-five-nuclear-weapons-issues-address-2024
https://www.iaea.org/about/history/atoms-for-peace-speech
https://www.armscontrol.org/issue-briefs/2024-06/2024-presidential-race-and-nuclear-weapons-threat#:~:text=Today%2C%20there%20is%20a%20heightened,a%20nuclear%2Darmed%20ballistic%20missile
