This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

At the end of World War II, as the world began to process the powerful and devastating effects of

the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humankind entered a new era,

an era defined by the destructive potential of nuclear weapons and the global arms race to acquire them.

And while the violent applications of atomic research had already been proven, governments and

scientists suspected atomic science also held promise for good, peaceful applications that could

bring the world into a new age of scientific progress and technology.

It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldier. It must be put into the hands

of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.

That's President Dwight Eisenhower addressing the UN in a 1953 speech titled,

Adams for Peace. In it, he proposes creating an agency to oversee and promote safe, secure,

and peaceful nuclear technologies, while also continuing to build up the United States arsenal of nuclear

weapons. That agency, created in 1957, was called the International Atomic Energy Association.

Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture,

medicine, and other peaceful activities. These efforts to find peaceful applications for nuclear

research would spur growth in nuclear energy, which now provides around a fifth of the United

States electricity, and expand the use of nuclear medicine, giving us imaging techniques and

therapies still used for cancer treatments today. That's our own sheree fusive. But then there

were ideas that seemed kind of crazy in hindsight. One science writer thought nuclear alchemy was

possible, though we would have nuclear factories that manufactured gold. He also believed we could

create artificial suns to control the weather, and others believed we could shower plants and

ionizing radiation to mutate them into better, stronger crops. But unlike the others,

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