The point is that there was never a time where Nuclear became unsafe. It was never a lie.

The reverse of your analogy would be if cigarettes were actually good for you but we banned them because two people died of lung cancer.

That's not accurate. By the 1960s and 70s, the scientific consensus [1] not only strongly believed smoking was a causal factor in lung cancer but also knew it contained radioactive isotopes of Polonium (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509609/) and lead.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/inde...