Atoms for peace and radiation for safety – how to build trust in irradiated foods in Cold War Europe and beyond

Abstract

When Eisenhower announced the decision of his administration to promote peaceful uses of atomic science and technology on an international scale in his famous Atoms for Peace speech in front of the United Nations' General Assembly on 8 December 1953, agriculture and food were among the potential areas of application that he mentioned. Consequently, the Atoms for Peace initiative prompted national governments of many countries as well as international institutions under the aegis of the United Nations and the Organisation for European Economic Co‐Operation to establish programs for the peaceful use of atomic energy in these domains. Using ionizing radiation for the preservation of food featured as one of the most promising applications of atomic energy in all these programs. However, the paradoxically overheated Cold War expectations about the potential of nuclear technologies could not erase the fear – fueled by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that radiation would have lethal effects when applied to human subsistence. Thus, efforts to use ionizing radiation to improve an essential human need such as food were met with distrust by its opponents. Their misgivings were actually incorporated into food legislation since it forced proponents to prove the safety of irradiated foods. To this end, food irradiation activists initiated wholesomeness studies to generate data in order to prove the safety of food, in an attempt to establish a science‐based trust regime. This paper sets out to explore how the advocates of food irradiation strove to define an internationally consistent safety concept and how this concept influenced national regulators in their task of institutionalizing trust in food.