Atoms for Peace helped produce the twin images of nuclear power as necessary and the United States as a leader in peace. It also obscured what the quest for nuclear supremacy looked like, as the United States pursued mining elements and manufactured bombs. These processes significantly harmed, and continue to harm, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and poor people around the world.
Between 1944 and 1986, the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), with the help of private mining corporations, extracted some 30 million tons of uranium ore from Navajo lands, much of which was used to make nuclear weapons. This extraction happened through leases with the Navajo Nation.
But even after the uranium mines closed in 1986, the legacy of this extraction continues. Several studies have shown that Navajo miners have unusually high mortality risks from a variety of cancers and respiratory diseases, their children are often born with birth complications and defects. As the current president of the Navajo Nation Buu V. Nygren wrote in TIME after the release of Oppenheimer: “This is not a problem of the past…with new victims regularly diagnosed.”
The Manhattan Project also set its eyes on uranium in the Belgian Congo. In 1945, the Shinkolobwe mine supplied around 80% of the uranium in the bombs used to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 1950s, almost two-thirds of uranium acquired by the U.S. military came from Shinkolobwe through a secret deal with Belgium. As the people of Congo mined more uranium for the United States under unlivable conditions, Atoms for Peace sponsored the construction of Africa’s first nuclear reactor in Congo, which began operations in 1959.
When Congo gained independence from Belgium a year later, however, the reactor became a national security problem, as a civil war between opposing factions quickly turned into a bloody proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. That summer, the AEC instructed a CIA agent to steal the fuel rods of Congo’s reactor, but the plan was dropped as the war raged on for five more years, killing two million people.
Nuclear bomb testing caused widespread suffering during the Cold War. Between 1951 and 1992, approximately 928 atomic bomb tests took place on Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Pueblo territories, where the Nevada Test Site stands. According to one study, the nuclear fallout of the bombs dropped over and under the region was 620 kilotons, which the wind carried throughout the Southwest, often into the Navajo Nation. By comparison, the fallout of the Hiroshima bomb was 13 kilotons. This was hardly the consecration of life promised by Eisenhower in 1953.