Skip to main content

Mystery And Hope

April 2023
1min read

America Enters the Age of Nuclear Power

When the United States tapped into the very essence of matter—the atom—and loosed its energy against Japan in 1945, it created a paradox that has colored the life of the world ever since. For if the power that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to what Winston Churchill called “the peace of mutual terror,” it also seemed to promise limitless possibilities for the material betterment of mankind; the energy that destroyed also could create. The atomic age, William L. Lawrence wrote in 1957, just a little over a month before the first nuclear power reactor in the United States came on line, “offers mankind all the power needed to equalize the maldistribution of nature’s bounty among the nations of the world. Thus it makes universal peace inevitable.…” By 1980, some estimates had it, nuclear power would be producing more energy than coal, oil, natural gas, and hydraulic power combined. We have not found universal peace, of course; and as of 1980, nuclear power still accounted for less than 13 per cent of the energy produced in the United States. On the following pages we offer a composite portrait of an age in which the promise of nuclear power seemed to counterbalance the peril into which the world had been thrust when the Enola Gay caught the city of Hiroshima in its bomb sight.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "June/July 1981"

Authored by: Norman Brouwer

A Photographic Portfolio

Authored by: Bernard A. Weisberger

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID McCULLOUGH

Authored by: The Editors

Three Hundred Years of Medicine in America: The Artists’ View

Authored by: John M. Taylor

A century ago a President’s murderer went on trial for the first time in our history. The issues raised then continue to trouble us.

Authored by: Edmund Morris

For TR, the nation s highest office was never a burden; he loved the job, and Americans loved him for loving it

Authored by: The Editors

A haunting portfolio of newly discovered Civil War photographs

The sexual habits of American women, examined half a century before Kinsey

Authored by: The Editors

America Enters the Age of Nuclear Power

Authored by: Larry L. Meyer

U-Boom on the Colorado Plateau

Featured Articles

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.