The Atoms for Peace USIS Films: Spreading the Gospel of the "Blessing" of Atomic Energy in the Early Cold War Era

Abstract

In 1955, the U.S. Information Service (USIS) Tokyo produced a thirty-minute documentary film Blessing of Atomic Energy in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film introduced how the Japanese government, researchers, and companies were using radioisotopes offered by the U.S. Argonne National Laboratory for the “peaceful” purposes in agriculture, medicine, hygiene, industry, and disaster prevention. The film also showed the mechanism of atomic power generation, and explained that it was already put into practice in the U.S. and Europe. The images of Japanese people enjoying the “blessing” of the “peaceful” use of atomic energy, ten years after the traumatic experience of A-bombs, were not only shown all over Japan, but also translated into different languages and shown in many countries, including the UK, Finland, Indonesia, Sudan, and Venezuela. The film was part of some fifty educational and documentary films produced for President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” campaign – a global information dissemination programs on the U.S. leadership in the civilian use of nuclear energy. This paper will explore the roles USIS films played in disseminating information on the “peaceful” use of nuclear energy in the early Cold War era.

Keywords

• Cold War
• USA
• USIS
• films
• atomic energy
• Japan