Expo’58:

Uranium exposed at Expo 58: the colonial agenda behind the peaceful atom

“…Because nuclear energy would play a key role in European postwar reconstruction, Expo 58 served larger goals beyond fascinating the public with technological innovations in order to promote the establishment of Euratom and to accommodate the European institutions in Brussels, as has been demonstrated by Stuart Leslie and Joris Mercelis. 9 Moreover, as Morrison Low has explored, the World's Fairs of Expo 58 and Expo 70 in Osaka played a significant part in selling the message of 'atoms for peace' to Japan. 10 But the 'peaceful atom' also found its encoded colonial conditions represented at Expo 58 in a way that brought together issues of colonial power, the technopolitics of nuclear energy, and the embodiment of futures that can be told through symbolic World's Fair architecture.…”