The Atoms for Peace Award was established in 1955 through a grant of $1,000,000 by the Ford Motor Company Fund. An independent nonprofit corporation was set up to administer the award.
The 22 recipients were:
- 1957 - Niels Bohr
- 1958 - George C. de Hevesy
- 1959 - Leó Szilárd and Eugene Paul Wigner
- 1960 - Alvin M. Weinberg and Walter H. Zinn
- 1961 - Sir John Cockcroft
- 1963 - Edwin M. McMillan and Vladimir I. Veksler
- 1967 - Isidor I. Rabi, W. Bennett Lewis, and Bertrand L. Goldschmidt
- 1968 - Sigvard Eklund , Abdus Salam, and Henry DeWolf Smyth
- 1969 - Aage N. Bohr, Ben R. Mottelson, Floyd L. Culler, Jr. , Henry S. Kaplan , Anthony L. Turkevich , M.S. Ioffe , and Compton A. Rennie
