New Perspectives on Political Advertising

George Dionisopoulos

FOR ALMOST A WEEK DURING 1979, the attention of the world was riveted upon the events which came to be known as the accident at Three Mile Island. The reactor cooling towers of the Unit Two reactor were pictured on the cover of Time magazine. The cover called the accident "America's Nuclear Nightmare." Before awakening from this nightmare, America witnessed several incidents which many believed would undermine public confidence in the nuclear power industry. Before the crisis was declared "over," the public witnessed Pennsylvania's Governor Richard Thornburgh's order to evacuate all preschool children and pregnant women from Harrisburg; arguments by officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) concerning the explosive potential of a hydrogen bubble in the reactor core; and a CBS newscast on March 30, in which Walter Cronkite intoned, "the world has never known a day quite like today" (Sandman & Paden, 1979, p. 44), and warned of "the remote but very real possibility of a nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island atomic power plant" (Farrell & Goodnight, 1981, p. 287).

Many people perceived the accident at Three Mile Island as "the beginning of the end for nuclear power in this country" ("The Nuclear Nightmare," 1979, p. 8). The end of the accident at Three Mile Island

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