In the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant precipitated by the earthquake and tsunami in March of 2011, the environmental risks of atomic power might seem obvious. Nuclear disasters have caused radiation sicknesses and death, poisoned the natural environment and its inhabitants, and jeopardized food safety. The construction of nuclear power plants has involved forest clearing, sea refilling, and other human alterations of the environment. Nuclear power plants themselves require monitoring of gaseous and liquid radioactive effluents and the contamination of nuclear waste. The assumption that Japan, having experienced first-hand the devastating capabilities of atomic power, should have understood these potential dangers has prompted questions about how the country came to allow the construction of nuclear reactors on its soil. How did the atom come to be viewed as safe and productive, rather than dangerous and destructive?

Yuki Tanaka and Peter J. Kuznick address these questions by focusing on the pivotal decade of the 1950s, when President Eisenhower's “Atoms for Peace” campaign sought to convince skeptics about the potential of peaceful atomic power. Considered together, these two articles also speak to contradictions and resistance in Japanese attitudes toward nuclear power, ironies in the role of the U.S. in influencing such views, and the dynamics of the U.S.-Japan relationship during this immediate postwar decade. Note the absence of discussions about the environmental impact of nuclear power at a time before the expansion of the industry in the 1970s and the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.