Restricted Data

Last year I wrote a post on here about the story behind the emblem of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). To quote from it:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has, without much competition, the coolest logo of any part of the UN. Heck, I’ll go so far as to say that they have the coolest logo of any atomic-energy organization in history. I mean, check this thing out:

It’s not only an atom, it’s an atom with style. It’s got a classic late-1950s/early-1960s asymmetrical, jaunty swagger. Those electrons are swinging, baby! This is an atom for love, not war, if you dig what I’m saying. An atom that knows how to have fun, even when it’s doing serious business, like investigating your nuclear program. The James Bond of atoms.

The summary version of the post is that the IAEA started informally using the atom with jaunty electron orbits as its emblem in 1957, realized that it was using a symbol for lithium, realized that lithium was fuel for H-bombs, and decided to add an electron to make it beryllium (which is still an important component of nuclear weapons but whatever). While they were sprucing it up a bit, they decided it might be fun to add on a bunch of other things as well:

Once the process of altering the emblem had started, further suggestions were made and soon a design evolved in which the central circle had been expanded into a global map of the world and five of the eight loops formed by the ellipses contained respectively: a dove of peace with an olive branch; a factory with smoking chimneys and surcharged with a train of three gear wheels; a microscope; two spears of grain; and finally a caduceus, to symbolise respectively the peaceful, industrial, research, agricultural and medicinal uses of atomic energy.

This monstrosity got made into a crazy gold-on-blue flag and hoisted up above the United Nations flag at the Third General Conference of the IAEA in 1958. As I wrote then,

Apparently in UN-world, this was seen as a major scandal. A representative of the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, saw it, flipped out, and had it immediately removed. And it was never seen again. 

After that they formalized the procedure for approving the emblem of the IAEA and we got the relatively conservative emblem seen above on the current IAEA flag.

My only regret about that post is that I couldn’t find a picture of the monstrous flag. I even contacted the IAEA and everything. No luck. The best I could do was an artist’s interpretation:

Which seemed a bit ridiculous but I thought it matched the description pretty well.

Well, guess what: the monstrous emblem has been found. Eric Reber, a radiation safety specialist at the IAEA,had read my previous blog post on this topic and then noticed framed documents on the walls at IAEA Headquarters regarding the evolution of the IAEA emblem. Among them were two different versions of the monstrous emblem, along with text noting that they had apparently been missing from the IAEA Archives until fairly recently, when copies were given as donations. Eric very helpfully took some photos of them and sent them to me in an e-mail.

They were designed by one Manfred Sollinger, about whom I know very little. Anyway, here they are. First, the one described in the passage above:

Which is not too far off from what I had guessed it to look like — the most striking difference between the size of the earth at the center. The other one had just a dove, but added another Earth:

Both of which are impressively ugly compared to the actual emblem the IAEA adopted. The first one has a cluttered, cheesy quality that would not have reproduced well at small sizes at all; the second one has unfortunately testicular overtones.

Anyway, it’s great that they were actually found. As someone who dabbles in graphic design, I am impressed with how something beautiful and brilliant almost turned out to be something terrible and tacky. The Sollinger designs overlaid so much symbolism onto the IAEA’s emblem that the whole thing almost tipped over. For once, sending the thing to committee seems to have improved the outcome, and we got a sleek, stylish atom for the ages instead.

Tags: 1950s, 1960s, Graphic design, IAEA

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2014 at 8:33 am and is filed under Visions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Citation: Alex Wellerstein, "The lost IAEA logo," Restricted Data: A Nuclear History Blog, September 26, 2014, accessed December 3, 2024, https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/26/lost-iaea-logo/.