Such a massive transition from war to peacetime empire required a massive, public symbolic action. Ezra's new technological paradise could not be erected under the cover of darkness. It would need to have a popular narrative, a high-minded and noble goal that would be capable of rationalizing the massive government and private expenditures it would entail. It would need to re-envision the terrifying, bloody might of the atom as an instrument of hope and modernity.
The break came in the person of the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ezra, through his continuing contacts with the administration, set off a clandestine but relentless lobbying campaign. He provided position papers and strategic studies to key cabinet ministers, appealing the argument that America's ultimate weapon in the Cold War was not the nuclear arsenal, but technological superiority. He proposed a bold new foreign policy piece: a global initiative under which the United States would share its peaceful nuclear technology with the developing world, building a new group of alliances not on military understandings, but mutual energy and wealth.
It was brilliant thinking. It was an emphatically positive appeal that went wonderfully with the post-war atmosphere, and it was brilliant strategy that would seal American influence for generations. The Eisenhower administration, looking for an effective way of countering Soviet propaganda, latched on to the idea.
In December 1953, the President spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations and delivered his now-legendary "Atoms for Peace" speech. He spoke of taking atomic power away from the hands of soldiers and handing it over to physicians, engineers, and agronomists. He proposed the creation of an International Atomic Energy Agency. The world, war-weary and terrorized of the bomb, applauded.
What the jubilant diplomats and the avid citizens did not realize was that the very basis of the proposal, the very framework of the "Atoms for Peace" initiative, had already been drafted months prior in the private study at Kykuit of Ezra Prentice.
Its first beneficiary, of course, was Ezra's own company. Where other companies were still trying to decide what in the world a nuclear reactor was, Prentice Applied Science was the only private company on earth with the technical expertise, the manufacturing ability, and the patent rights that could actually build one.
Gancingnai, as it would be renamed later, was awarded practically overnight with a new wave of contracts, not only with the American government, but with other countries worldwide. It began negotiating contracts with building nuclear power plants in countries as far away as Brazil and Pakistan, Iran and the newly created nation of Israel.
This was not business as usual; it was the very exercise of geopolitics. A nation whose electricity it counted on Prentice-built reactors for, whose upkeep it counted on his technicians for, whose nuclear fuel it counted on Prentice's supply chain for in the form of enriched uranium, was never going to end up in the Soviet sphere. It was building an entirely new, intangible empire, bound together with the flow of electrons and the half-life of isotopes.
And yet this fresh strategy placed him straight on a collision course with the other great, rising empire within his own family: his nephew David's Chase-Rockefeller International Bank.
The argument had come to a head in a furious session in David's office on Wall Street. The young Rockefeller, himself already a giant of world finance, had recently returned from spending some time in a developing world where Ezra hoped to build himself a new reactor.
"I cannot, in good conscience, have the bank play the secondary financing on this project, Uncle Ezra," responded David in cold, professional regret.
Ezra was taken aback. "It's a safe bet, David. The host government is solid, and the American government is securing the transaction. It's practically risk-free."
"The financial risk is not the issue," David said, interlacing his fingers. "The issue is the nature of the investment itself. I have spoken with the leaders of the region, with the businessmen there. You are not offering them energy, Uncle Ezra. You are continuing with a new, more damaging form of colonialism."
Ezra frowned at the word. "That's absurd. We're offering them the chance to industrialize, get their citizens out of poverty."
"Are we?" defied David. "Or are we making them entirely and absolutely dependent on us? You call the shots on design. You call the shots on construction. You call the shots on the enriched fuel supply. You call the shots on the maintenance contracts and technicians. You're turning them vassals of your atomic kingdom. They're trading in their former colonial masters in London and Paris for an abstract, more powerful one in New York. My bank," he declared, voice ringing with the passion of his own credo, "is in the business of building partnerships, of building independent growth. What you're building is dependencies. It's a brilliant maneuver of manipulation, I'll give you that. But it is not a partnership, and it is not a legacy I wish attached to the Rockefeller name."
The ideological divide between them, once a hairline fracture, had evolved into an abyss. It was a fundamental disagreement over the nature of power itself. David, the banker, preferred the soft power of common interest and economic interlock. Ezra, the emperor, preferred the hard power of technological monopoly and strategic domination.
As the new empire of Ezra expanded, another, quieter force began running parallel with it. Alta, alone and adrift in her husband's world of clandestine war, found in his new, upbeat vision of the future a sense of direction she had never experienced. She would observe the immense upheaval and social ferment of his mega-projects in the ancient world. As he would build the reactors, she would build the hospitals.
Through her own enormous leverage as a Rockefeller and her own impressive income from her own trusts, she created an entirely new foundation of philanthropy. It was an efficient, highly endowed organization with a purpose of building schools, hospitals, and sanitary water installations in the very same countries that Prentice Applied Science was building nuclear facilities.
She was trying, with gentle, fierce idealism, to impart a human face to his cold, technocratic growth. She was trying to ease the hurts his empire caused, to compensate for the human cost of his grandiose plans. It was an admirable, extremely ethical project. But it generated, as well, a new, implicit tension between them. Her work, of course, often highlighted the dark side of his. Her clinics would treat men made homeless by his massive building programs; her schools would teach children of yeomen whose farms were taken for the purpose of passing through them yet another of the power grids with which he was covering the globe. They were working together, but with different ends in view: he was building an environment of systems and power, and she was trying to save the people being squeezed beneath.
Ezra's final risk with the last vision, however, became all too real on a winter morning in Ontario, Canada. One of the smaller, test NRX reactors at the Chalk River Laboratories—a research reactor designed and built by his company that incorporated his patented technologies—a catastrophic power surge occurred. A chain of mechanical failures and human errors led to a partial meltdown of the reactor's core.
The accident was eventually controlled with the efforts of the site scientists, but it was the first large nuclear accident globally. When the news broke through the censors, it generated panic waves worldwide.
Ezra's peaceful, clean, safe atom was immediately transformed into a dreadful nightmare. The utopian visions of his Atoms for Peace crusade were simultaneously tarnished. The mishap had handed his enemies—the political isolationists of Washington, the rival energy interests, the resentful members of his own family—the ultimate weapon they had all longed for. The atom had unveiled its terrible, ungovernable aspect, and Ezra Prentice, as its chief proselytiser, was now subject to an international response that would pulverise his new world order before it had yet fully emerged.