Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

And I think a general feeling of excitement about modernity in the future.

It really was presented quite favorably in the media.

There was a Disney program called Our Friend the Atom.

It starts with a man finding a bottle in the ocean and a genie pops out and basically says that the atom has all of these incredible powers and it has risks, but if we can make it our friends, then we'll have all of these wonders in our lives.

That was a very, I think, influential piece of propaganda at the time.

I mean, the government was deeply involved at every level in every stage of this.

It was subsidizing nuclear power plants in various ways, in part by giving them backup insurance in the case of accidents.

So the government was definitely pushing it pretty hard.