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 the plutonium, and the room lights up with a bluish flash. Slotin immediately throws the top covering off, letting it fall to the floor to stop the chain reaction, but it’s too late: he knows, better than anyone, that he’s already absorbed a lethal dose of radiation. Within hours, he begins vomiting; his relatives are flown to him to bid him farewell. He dies a week later. Three of the other seven scientists in the lab will also die from radiation several years later. Slotin has added years to their lives by acting as a “safety device” by removing the beryllium. The plutonium core of that Mark-3 bomb had already killed another of his co-workers the year before and was therefore nicknamed the Demon Core. It was decided to detonate it in a test at Bikini Atoll, but it was ultimately melted down to make other nuclear warheads.

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 design bureaus of Energiya, Strela, and Zvezda would later be located here. Until 1973, Mission Control was in Yevpatoria, Crimea. Then, for the Apollo-Soyuz missions, the TsUP was created. The ISS was controlled from the TsUP until February 2001, when control passed to Houston. It returned to Moscow only immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and because of the passage of Hurricanes Lili and Rita over Houston. Mission Control for several military missions is located in Golitsyno, just west of Moscow, with others in Kurilovo (SW of Moscow) and Noginsk. Until 2006, Russia also had a powerful fleet of Tracking Ships.

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 1958, the company will change its name to “Sony.”

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 imprisoned fascists, only a tiny minority will serve several years in prison, and in the summer of 1946, all sentences under five years are expunged and the inmates are released. Italian courts issue proportionately fewer death sentences than any other Western country: 92 for a population of 45 million. Twenty times fewer than in France. And no Italian will ever be brought to trial for crimes committed outside Italy.

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 it into a commercial product: the photocopier. He remained CEO until 1967 and remained chairman until his death in 1971.

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 Carlo method, which involves choosing a set of random inputs for the simulation, which is then repeated a large number of times. The Monte Carlo method will quickly become a success, and the first fruit will be the H-bomb.

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 handing the country over to the royalist right, which secured the king’s return. At the end of 1946, the Communist Party formed the Democratic Army of Greece and resumed the civil war. For two years, violence and counter-violence raged, with occasional intervention from the British and Americans, and Stalin’s refusal to aid the Greek communists, perhaps in response to the October 1944 agreement with Churchill in Moscow. The civil war finally ended in 1949 with the complete defeat of the left.

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 the map. Zawadka Morochowska is just one case among thousands across Eastern Europe, where the end of the war is also seen as an opportunity to settle old grievances.

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 is considered the most important of Jesus’ followers), the Gnostic Book of Philip (in which Mary Magdalene kisses Jesus on the mouth several times, an act to be read in a spiritual way, not as a sexual act, typical instead of different cultures), the agnostic Apocalypse of Peter (in which Christ is presented in a more human way), the Secret Book of John, the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Sacred Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (the Gospel of the Egyptians); according to Gnostic Christianity, the infinite God manifests himself in us.

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 his jaw broken, lost all his teeth, and suffered from several debilitating diseases. Meanwhile, his main competitor, Valentin Glushko, took advantage of the situation to denounce him. At the end of the war, Tupolev worked with Stalin to convince him of the valuable contribution Korloyev could make to rocketry for the USSR, and he was released in 1945.

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 of them: 600,000. Statistics based on the invasion of the last islands close to Japan, such as Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

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 and the head of the dynasty that will rule the country for generations.