The Atoms for Peace Award was established in 1955 through a grant of $1,000,000 by the

Ford Motor Company Ford Motor Company (commonly known as Ford) is an American multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan, United States. It was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. The company sells automobi ...

Fund. An independent nonprofit corporation was set up to administer the award for the development or application of peaceful nuclear technology. It was created in response to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's

Atoms for Peace "Atoms for Peace" was the title of a speech delivered by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the UN General Assembly in New York City on December 8, 1953. The United States then launched an "Atoms for Peace" program that supplied equipment ...

speech to the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoniz ...

. The 23 recipients were: *1957 –

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 ...

*1958 – George C. de Hevesy *1959 –

Leó Szilárd Leo Szilard (; hu, Szilárd Leó, pronounced ; born Leó Spitz; February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-German-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear ...

and

Eugene Paul Wigner Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner ( hu, Wigner Jenő Pál, ; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his con ...

*1960 –

Alvin M. Weinberg Alvin Martin Weinberg (; April 20, 1915 – October 18, 2006) was an American nuclear physicist who was the administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) during and after the Manhattan Project. He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1945 ...

and Walter Henry Zinn *1961 – Sir

John Cockcroft Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, (27 May 1897 – 18 September 1967) was a British physicist who shared with Ernest Walton the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951 for splitting the atomic nucleus, and was instrumental in the development of nuclea ...

*1963 –

Edwin M. McMillan Edwin Mattison McMillan (September 18, 1907 – September 7, 1991) was an American physicist credited with being the first-ever to produce a transuranium element, neptunium. For this, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seabor ...

and Vladimir I. Veksler *1967 –

Isidor I. Rabi Isidor Isaac Rabi (; born Israel Isaac Rabi, July 29, 1898 – January 11, 1988) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance im ...

, W. Bennett Lewis and

Bertrand Goldschmidt Bertrand Goldschmidt (2 November 1912 – 11 June 2002) was a French chemist. He is considered one of the fathers of the French atomic bomb, which was tested for the first time in 1960 in the nuclear test Gerboise Bleue. Biography Bertrand Go ...

*1968 –

Sigvard Eklund Sigvard Arne Eklund (19 June 1911 – 30 January 2000) was Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1961 to 1981. Career Eklund was born in Kiruna, Norrbotten County, Sweden, the son of train driver Severin Eklund and ...

Abdus Salam Mohammad Abdus Salam Salam adopted the forename "Mohammad" in 1974 in response to the anti-Ahmadiyya decrees in Pakistan, similarly he grew his beard. (; ; 29 January 192621 November 1996) was a Punjabi Pakistani theoretical physicist and a ...

, and Henry DeWolf Smyth *1969 –

Aage Bohr Aage Niels Bohr (; 19 June 1922 – 8 September 2009) was a Danish nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 with Ben Roy Mottelson and James Rainwater "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and pa ...

Ben Roy Mottelson Ben Roy Mottelson (9 July 1926 – 13 May 2022) was an American-Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei. Early life Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois o ...

, Floyd L. Culler, Jr., Henry Kaplan,

Anthony L. Turkevich Anthony Leonid Turkevich (July 23, 1916 – September 7, 2002) was an American radiochemist who was the first to determine the composition of the Moon's surface using an alpha scattering spectrometer on the Surveyor 5 mission in 1967. Early ...

Mikhail Ioffe Mikhail Solomonovich Ioffe (russian: Михаил Соломонович Иоффе; 2 September 191714 July 1996) was a Soviet physicist best known for his work on magnetic mirror fusion devices, and especially his 1961 experimental device that ...

M.S.Ioffe was forced to decline the Award by the Soviet government and Compton A. Rennie *1969 –

Dwight D. Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...

Notes

External links

Files
referring to the award and its presentation in the libraries of the MIT, seen at libraries.mit.edu, December 2, 2009 (PDF) * Atoms for Peace Peace awards {{award-stub