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.

Let us face without panic the reality of our times.

The fact that atom bombs may someday be dropped on our cities.

And let us prepare for survival by understanding the weapon

that threatens us.

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 the 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 mobilised 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

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