The Disneyfication of Atomic Power
John Jay Hopkins’s visit to Japan in 1955, as an informal emissary of “Atoms for Peace,” must have seemed surreal to everyone involved. Hopkins was the head of an old American shipbuilding firm based out of Groton, Connecticut. Electric Boat Company had struggled in the 1920s and 1930s with its reputation as a “merchant of death,” having sold warships to all sides in major wars. During World War II, it had stuck to the Allied war effort, producing several hundred patrol torpedo boats that became decisive in the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific between American and Japanese forces. The Japanese had called them “devil boats,” harassing Japanese ships and helping American marines to take control of the vast Japanese Pacific empire. The company had also produced dozens of submarines that killed Japanese sailors. One of these, the USS Barb, was alone credited with sinking 17 Japanese vessels, including the aircraft carrier Un’yō. The Barb even had pioneered the use of submarine-launched rockets, bombarding civilians in towns on Japan’s home islands in 1945.
Just 10 years after Japan’s defeat, and only three years after the departure of United States occupation forces, Hopkins was in Japan being treated not as a foe but as a hero. He had made some changes to his company, including its name. It was now called General Dynamics, with Electric Boat one of its subsidiaries, mostly hidden from view. He had hired a graphic designer to help him to rebrand, creating a series of posters with the words “Atoms for Peace” next to “General Dynamics” in several different languages. He made speeches suggesting that American technology was going to provide power and food to the world and that his company stood ready to participate in a kind of global Marshall Plan that harnessed the atom. Perhaps surprisingly, the first country to take him seriously was Japan, the only country to have been attacked with atomic bombs. Hopkins was capitalizing on President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech, in which he declared the U.S. would use atomic energy “for the benefit of all mankind.”
