Atomic Goddess

"The story of screen legend Rita Hayworth’s image gracing an atomic bomb has been around for over sixty years and it is, by this point, a firmly established part of the star’s official biography. Indeed, the supposed decorative honor even made it into the Love Goddess’s 1987 New York Times obituary as an undisputed fact.

But is the tale 100% accurate? When CONELRAD first heard about the Hayworth bombshell, we could not wait to locate a photograph of it for permanent display on the front page of our website. After all, what better symbol of atomic popular culture could there possibly be? Rita Hayworth was one of the biggest female movie stars and pin-ups of the 1940s and the atomic bomb was the most significant scientific and military development of the century (and, perhaps, of all time). In other words, to our ears, it was a match made in CONELRAD heaven and we desperately wanted to believe.

But in trying to track down the elusive image we discovered that the story may have been too good to be entirely true. In the course of our admittedly obsessive quest, we spent a considerable amount of time attempting to determine whether the Rita Hayworth bomb story is myth or fact or somewhere in between. The article that follows is the culmination of our research. ..."

Rita Hayworth and the legend of the Bikini bombshell : Atomic Goddess Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 as told by Bill Geerhart.