Year:
1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | 1946 | 1947 | 1948 | 1949
It was not until July 13, 1942, in the midst of World War II,
that the United States undertook the Manhattan
Project to develop an atomic bomb. By December 2, a
Manhattan Project team headed by Enrico
Fermi produced the first artificial fission reaction at the
University of Chicago. Three years after its inception, the Manhattan
Project achieved its goal of developing an atomic weapon.World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, less than a month after
the death of President
Franklin Roosevelt; however, plans for the development and
use of atomic weapons continued.At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the United States conducted the
world’s first nuclear test explosion at Alamogordo, New
Mexico. The Nuclear Age was born, a product of the fear, violence, and
suffering of World War II. J.
Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los
Alamos Laboratory, upon witnessing the explosion, recalled
the following passage from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the
destroyer of worlds."Within a month, nuclear weapons were used to destroy the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. When he received word of the bombing of
Hiroshima, President
Truman exclaimed, "This is the greatest day in history!"On August 8, 1945, two days after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, representatives of the U.S., United Kingdom, U.S.S.R., and
France created an International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to try Axis leaders for war
crimes. Japan signed a surrender agreement on September 2, ending the
war in the Pacific.On October 24, 1945, the United
Nations Charter entered into force, and the new
international organization was founded. Yet, the good intentions of this
new peacekeeping organization were threatened by the onset of the Cold
War. At the first meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S.
delegate proposed a plan to internationalize control of atomic energy.
The plan was rejected by the Soviet Union, which tested its first
nuclear weapons in 1949, ending the U.S. monopoly.By 1947, the Cold War was playing a major role in U.S. foreign
policy. The Truman
Doctrine proclaimed that the U.S. would assist any country
threatened by Communist aggression, and the National Security Act
created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).The Cold War intensified in February 1948 when the Communists took
over Czechoslovakia and the U.S.S.R. initiated the Berlin Blockade. That
same year, UN General Assembly adopted a Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.By 1949, Chinese Communist insurgents led by Mao Zedong took power. The
North Atlantic Treaty was signed, creating NATO,
and the Berlin Blockade came to an end. In August, 1949, the U.S.S.R.
detonated its first atomic bomb.The 1940s was the most violent decade of the century, ending with
around 54,000,000 persons killed in warfare. Sixty percent of those
killed were civilians.
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1940s
