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The Finnish Prime Minister coined what would eventually become the Paasikivi-Kekkonen Line, a Finnish realpolitik to keep the Soviet/Russian enemy at bay. It was based on the awareness that Finland was weak, that it could not count on the help of democratic countries for various

James Hamill shows Von Braun 200 of Goddard’s patents, which the U.S. government had painstakingly obtained from the Guggenheim Foundation, which had received them as a gift from Goddard.

The (chemical) “Green Revolution” in agriculture begins, increasing crop yields by 140%

H1N1 virus epidemic, of Russian origin

American psychologist Harry Harlow studies the psychological development of monkeys. He gives a very young monkey two dummy monkeys: one made of wire but with a nipple from which it can suck, and one made of wood covered in skin. The baby monkey invariably attaches

The United States spends $5.5 trillion on its nuclear weapons program.

From Truman’s decision to begin the all-out effort to the Kennedy presidency, the American nuclear weapons stockpile increased from 300 to 18,000.

The Soviets have been developing the H-bomb since at least 1948. According to the memoirs of Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb and a future dissident, “Stalin was determined to have it, and any American move toward abandoning it would have been interpreted

Jubilee celebrated by Pius XII

The average working week dropped to 45 hours in Western Europe and 40 hours in the United States. It was 65 and 60 hours, respectively, in 1870.

Robert Oppenheimer appears before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), seeks to cooperate with the committee, which includes Richard Nixon

Claude Shannon of the Bell Telephone Company publishes an important work that will become the basis of the computer age.

The EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), at the University of Cambridge, stores programs electronically and translates them from alphabetic notation into machine code (binary). It is the first to do so.

George Orwell’s “1984” is published.

The Dutch recognize Indonesia’s independence, 4 years after Indonesia declared it.

Andreas Nikolaus Lauda, better known as Niki Lauda, was born in Vienna, Austria. He would go on to become one of the greatest Formula One drivers, a three-time World Champion.

Richard Feynman provides an original and illuminating interpretation of antimatter: matter that moves backwards in time; it will then be discovered that antimatter is in fact matter with the triple transformation CPT (Charge, Parity, Time) applied.

A neutral version of the pion is discovered using the 350 MV Alvarez-Lawrence particle accelerator. This is the first new particle discovered using a particle accelerator. This will pave the way for the construction of ever larger accelerators.

Claude Shannon of the Bell Telephone Company established that information is measured in quantities of reduction of ignorance, called bits; a bit is the amount of information needed to halve the ignorance (uncertainty) of the receiver.

Harry Truman confirmed at the White House

The newspaper L’Unità (incredibly) praises Trofym Lysenko’s Lysenkoism, which advocates non-genetic inheritance and denounces genetics as a capitalist pseudoscience. Lysenkoism has already caused famines and disasters, first in the USSR, and will later cause them in Mao’s China, resulting in millions of deaths through misguided

Los Angeles, California. The city is bombarded with perfume. Angelique & Co. (originally called Skunk Works, a name unbecoming of a perfume company like its predecessor), in a publicity stunt, loads 284 liters of perfume onto ten Beechcraft Bonanza planes, which are then released over

Civil War in Greece. According to American sources, only 25 collaborators were executed after judicial convictions in 1948. However, 2,500 death sentences were carried out on left-wingers between July 1946 and September 1949.

George Gamow of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor shows that when the universe was only 100 years old, it would have produced deuterium.

A few hours after the declaration of the Israeli state, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq attack Israel: First Arab-Israeli War

Friday, 4:00 PM. The State of Israel is proclaimed. The United States and the Soviet Union, replacing Great Britain, are the new guarantors of the new world order.

First Italian elections: Christian Democracy defeats the Popular Front

Formally titled “The Origin of the Chemical Elements,” the paper that would become known as the αβγ paper was published in the April 1948 issue of Physical Review. In physical cosmology, the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper, or the αβγ paper, was authored by Ralph Alpher, then a

Soviet troops intervene in Czechoslovakia to suppress a nascent democracy

The “Venona” project, with which the American secret services systematically decrypted all Soviet messages, is revealed to the Soviets by a mole: years of work go up in smoke and for six months the Americans are completely blinded to what the Soviets are saying.

The American Anti-Trust Force forces the Du Pont family to sell its 23% stake in General Motors; at the beginning of the 20th century, Du Pont’s intervention in the crisis-ridden General Motors had saved the company.

The Englishman B. Thomas discovered that the friction of water in pipes could be significantly reduced by using small (1%) quantities of polymers dissolved in the water; the long polymer chains, in fact, discourage the formation of vortices and turbulence that would slow the flow

Hermann Julius Oberth moved to Italy for some time where he studied some missiles for the Italian Navy, missiles which however were never built

The Fresh Kills landfill opens in New York City; at 12 square kilometers, it will become the largest cohesive man-made structure in the world. It will close in 2001 and will also house much of the debris from the World Trade Center.

The Republic of Korea is proclaimed in Seoul and the Democratic Republic of Korea in Pyongyang.

The Hashemites, ousted from Saudi Arabia by the Saud clan, moved to Iraq and the region called Trans-Jordan, which would later become Jordan. Like Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, this region had never existed as a territorial entity, having been invented by the British. At the

Romania. King Michael is forced to sign the act of abdication and flee the country. He will return only in 1992.

Charles Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. He is released from a B-29 at 6,000 meters, then reaches an altitude of 14 kilometers, where he causes the sonic boom heard throughout the Mojave Desert.

In America, research on intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles is interrupted: the fission warheads weigh too much (4500 kg)

CF Powell discovers pions in cosmic rays

The Russians dynamited Hitler’s bunker in Berlin.

Soviet Union: After ten years of Gulag prison sentences for millions of Soviet citizens, their prison terms finally expire and they enjoy freedom. They had all been convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, which authorizes the arrest of anyone who dissents, or even

Paris. In the Peace Treaty after the Second World War, Italy must compensate the countries it declared war on and occupied. The most significant compensation is territorial, with the loss of its colonies, a decision pushed by Great Britain, and of two Alpine municipalities: Istria

De Gasperi, on a visit to the United States, obtains a loan of 100 million dollars and compensation of 50 million dollars for the damages suffered during the war.

Poland. In a flurry of rigged elections across Eastern Europe, Polish communists win 70% of the vote in the official count.

Alphonse Al Capone dies in his Florida mansion, consumed by syphilis and demented. He had been released from prison a few years earlier for good behavior, where he was serving a sentence for tax evasion. His mother later declared him “a good boy who only

The First Indochina War begins: Ho Chi Min leaves the negotiating table in Geneva and begins a guerrilla war against the French.

Charles Darwin, director of the National Physical Laboratory and grandson of the famous naturalist, stated in 1946 that a single computer would be more than sufficient to satisfy the needs of the entire nation. By 1950, there were already dozens of electronic computers in England.

De Gasperi Governments (DC-PSI-PCI-PRI-PLI-PSDI)

The Anglo-American Loan Agreement was a loan made to the United Kingdom by the United States on July 15, 1946, allowing its economy to stay afloat after World War II. The loan was negotiated by British economist John Maynard Keynes and American diplomat William L.

First hearing of the trial of Japanese war criminals

3:20 PM. Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nuclear weapons expert Louis Slotin is lowering a beryllium covering over a plutonium core, a process he’s done dozens of times before. He uses a screwdriver to slowly lower the top covering, then the screwdriver slips, beryllium falls onto

Romania. Former Interior Minister General Aurel Aldea is arrested for “plotting to destroy the Romanian state.” He and 55 accomplices were tried and sentenced on November 18 of the same year to life in prison.

TsUP, Korolev (formerly Kaliningrad). Tsentr Upravleniye Polyotami, the mission control center, is the TsUP in Kaliningrad, later renamed Korolev by Yeltsin on July 8, 1996. It is located just west of Star Town. The Korolev OKB-1 was built in Kaliningrad as early as 1946. The

Nihonbashi area, Tokyo, Japan. Akio Morita joins Masaru Ibuka’s electronics store in Shirokiya to found a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (東京通信工業, Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) with an initial eight employees. The company will build Japan’s first tape recorder, the Type-G. In

Italy. Only a year has passed since the end of the war, but the purge has already become a farce: of the 394,000 public employees investigated for collaboration, only 1,580 are fired, and most of them will soon return to their jobs. Of the 50,000

Joseph C. Wilson inherited Haloid from his father. It later became Xerox. In 1946, he reached an agreement with inventor Chester Carlson to purchase his invention (a process for printing images on paper using an electrically charged drum and dry powder as toner). He developed

After leaving the University of Pennsylvania, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly founded the first commercial computer company: the Electronic Control Company; their first product was the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) for the US census.

Construction of the WHIRLWIND computer at MIT, a general-purpose computer derived from a flight simulator

Finally, peace in (Western) Europe: the European Union is born.

George Gamow lays out the foundations of the Big Bang theory

New Mexico, United States. Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish immigrant, passes the time playing cards. He is a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He thus comes up with the idea of approaching the problem of bomb simulation with what will be called the Monte

Civil War in Greece. Only one year after the Varkiza armistice, right-wing gangs killed 1,192 people, injured 6,413, and raped 159 women (official government figures). The Greek Communist Party, angered by the repeated violations of the armistice, decided not to participate in the elections, thus

Poland in the East. Colonel Stanislav Pluto’s Polish 34th Infantry Regiment surrounds the village of Zawadka Morochowska, entirely ethnically Ukrainian. They then carry out a massacre, killing at least 56 people, and order the survivors to flee to Ukraine. The village is almost wiped off

Birth of the Von Neumann architecture of electronic computers

Enrico Fermi and his family leave Los Alamos and return to Chicago

In Egypt, at Nag Hammadi, some apocryphal gospels have been found that hark back to Gnostic Christianity, abolished by the Roman Empire in 400; Gnostic Christianity includes the Gnostic Book of Peter (where Jesus laughs, something never mentioned in the Christian gospels, and Mary Magdalene

Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov is freed by Stalin. Stalin’s NKVD had purged all senior officers in the force in 1937, including him. After being beaten into confessing and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in a Siberian gold mine, he was beaten several times, had

Hungary. Communist Party membership increases from 3,000 to half a million in a single year.

The Nuremberg trials open with 25 defendants

Robert Oppenheimer gives a speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists in which he justifies the use of the atomic bomb as inevitable

This is the date of the planned American landing on Japan’s mainland islands, had the country not surrendered after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The American General Staff was preparing 1.8 million soldiers for the invasion and was prepared to lose a third

North Korea. A relatively unknown Korean guerrilla fighter, trained in a Soviet military camp (Khabarovsk), stocky, in his thirties, with a bowl-cut haircut, is recognized by the Soviets as an “eminent leader.” This is Kim Il Sung, the future dictator for life of North Korea

Philosopher Karl Popper publishes The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger is punished for his support of the Nazi regime and is barred from university teaching.

China. Japan’s surrender leaves a devastated and divided China, with two million Japanese soldiers still on the ground awaiting repatriation. Tibet falls under British control, Mongolia falls under Soviet control, while Xinjiang moves toward long-awaited autonomy. Tibet and Xinjiang will not fare smoothly, while Mongolia

Usti nad Labem (German: Aussig), Czechoslovakia. Over a hundred Germans are massacred in revenge. Other similar incidents occur throughout the country: in Postoloprty, northern Bohemia, 800 people are murdered in cold blood, and 763 bodies are found in mass graves years later; in Taus (Czech:

First Nuclear Bomb at Alamagordo (New Mexico): “Trinity”, detonation from a 32m tower, 21Kton, leaves a crater 3m deep and 335m wide

Monday. 5:29:45 AM (local time). The first atomic bomb explodes. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb in history was secretly detonated in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico. The British and Americans had begun developing the bomb in utmost secrecy in 1940.

Humanity gains the ability not only to change the course of history, but also to end it.