The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which was falling into disrepair, is back in action.

Carpigiani was founded in Bologna to produce ice cream packaging machines.

The characters Sylvester and Tweety are born

Two Japanese Navy I-400 and I-401-class supersubmarines were captured in the Pacific Ocean by the Americans; their mission was to release rats and insects infected with cholera, bubonic plague, and typhus off American cities on the West Coast; the mission was never completed.

China. American Ambassador Patrick Hurley arranges a meeting between Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek and Communist leader Mao Zedong in Chongqing, the Nationalist capital. The two leaders attend diligently, but hostilities resume immediately after the meeting.

Gen. MacArthur has full power to reinvent postwar Japan (including the constitution).

Germany and Russia had horrific death rates during World War II. But the average figure for the entire 20th century yields values of 0.16%/year (Germany) and 0.15%/year (Russia), compared to 0.03%/year for Japan and, in Napoleon’s 19th century, 0.07%/year for France. These figures pale in comparison to the 0.25%/year for the Aztecs in the century that led to their extinction and the 1%/year (again due to warfare) for the hunter-gatherer tribes of Papua New Guinea.

Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese gather in Saigon to listen to Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence from the French, broadcast on the radio from Hanoi.

We are reborn and with us a new species of life form is born: the computer.

Japan’s surrender on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay: End of World War II. 60 million dead: >30 million Russia, 13 million China, 6 million Poland, 6 million Germany (4.5 million soldiers and 1.5 million civilians), 2 million Japan (0.4 million civilians), 0.3 Italy, USA (405,399 American casualties), UK, France. Russia loses 10% of its population in the conflict and another 10% dies due to Stalinist repression. Greece loses 6% of its population, Hungary 5%, Yugoslavia 6.3%, the Baltics 9%, Poland 15%, Ukraine 20%, and Belarus 25%! Total cost: $7 trillion. It was, in absolute terms, the most destructive event in human history. 90 million people in all but 18 countries of the world were affected

MacArthur arrives in Tokyo

First American landings in the Japanese mainland islands

Only now has the United States produced enough plutonium to arm a third plutonium atomic bomb (the first was Trinity and the second was Nagasaki).

Romania. Petru Groza’s communists, after taking over the country’s political government and controlling its security forces, dismantled the other two pillars of democratic society: a free press and an independent judiciary. Over 1,000 judges were dismissed and replaced with Communist Party officials.

Japan. The Japanese authorities were terrified that American soldiers might do to Japanese women what their own soldiers had done in the occupied territories. Three days after the surrender, the Ministry of the Interior ordered all police officers to organize “comfort services” for the Allied conquerors: Japanese women recruited for the Entertainment and Leisure Association (RAA), which required the sacrifice of their bodies as a patriotic duty, so that respectable Japanese women could walk the streets in peace.

Proclamation of Indonesian Independence by Soekarno

The Red Army, despite the Japanese capitulation, occupies the Kurii Islands north of Hokkaido and the Soviet government annexes them.

The US government releases the official report on the Manhattan Project: the Smyth Report.

American Robert Goddard died without justice for his inventions on liquid-fueled rockets and their gyroscope-based control. In 1950, his family sued the U.S. government for this, and in 1960, the government paid the Goddard family $1 million in compensation.

12:01 p.m., Japan time: Plutonium Fission Bomb (Fat Man) dropped on Nagasaki: 20,000 dead. The city of Nagasaki is bombed by a B-29 “Bockascar” by the crew of another B-29, “The Great Artiste,” only after flying in vain over Kokura, which was covered by clouds.

The last Allied soldiers leave the city of Modena

Military strategist Bernard Brodie stops to buy a copy of the New York Times where he learns of the atomic bomb explosion on Hiroshima and declares: “Everything I have written is obsolete.”

Hiroshima. The only doctor in Tokyo studying nuclear physics, Taro Takemi, is in Hiroshima, where, using a simple but effective method involving a radioscope, he determines that the explosion was nuclear in nature. The news is immediately communicated to the Emperor. If it is true that the Emperor surrendered because of the atomic bombs, Takemi reasons, and considering that the Emperor would have sacrificed the entire nation if it were not for the atomic bombs, then these bombs may have saved Japan.

Hiroshima. The explosion that obliterated the city and killed 80,000 people was caused by the fission of 0.7 grams of uranium U-235, as 98.67% of the uranium in the bomb disintegrated before it became supercritical. This is about the weight of a dime.

8:15:17 a.m. Japan time: Uranium Fission Nuclear Bomb (Little Boy) dropped on Hiroshima, killing 80,000. It is dropped by the B-29 Enola Gay after a 5:30 flight from Tinian Island, Saipan. The commander and pilot is Paul Tibbets.

Tinian Island, Western Pacific Ocean. Parts for three nuclear implosion bombs (with plutonium charges) arrive on the island. One, unarmed, will be dropped into the Pacific on August 8th as a test; another is prepared the following day and will be dropped on Nagasaki; and the third will never be used.

Vannevar Bush presented President Truman with the letter “Science, the Endless Frontier,” proposing the creation of a research collaboration between government, industry, and academia. It would make a difference for the United States for decades to come.

Vannevar Bush, in his article “As We May Think” (in the Atlantic magazine), discusses a personal computer that ordinary people could use and take home. He calls it a memex. It would serve as a “mechanized private file and library” and an “enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

The cruiser Indianapolis, which delivered the atomic bomb for the Enola Gay, was sunk by a Japanese submarine. The delivery operation was top secret, which led to misunderstandings and problems in the rescue operation, which only found the 316 survivors (of 1,199) on August 2.

Japan rejects the Potsdam Declaration, thus laying the groundwork, according to American strategy, for the dropping of atomic bombs on its metropolitan territory.

The cruiser Indianapolis delivers the atomic bomb to Tinian Harbor. It will be loaded onto the Enola Gay. The operation is top secret and therefore unguarded. On the return voyage, the ship is sunk by a Japanese submarine.

Churchill defeated at the polls, Labour in power

China, the United States, and Great Britain draft the Potsdam Declaration, demanding Japan’s immediate unconditional surrender or face complete and utter destruction.

President Truman addressed Stalin with, “We have a new weapon, endowed with uncommon destructive force.” He mistakenly assumed Stalin didn’t understand the meaning of that phrase. Instead, Stalin ordered the effort to build nuclear weapons to be accelerated and entrusted Beria, head of the secret police, with overseeing the project.

In Potsdam, Stalin is informed by Truman of the successful test of the atomic bomb, the Soviet dictator reacts happily to the news, but does not ask questions about the nature of the new technology.

B-29s of the 509th Composite Group (which would later bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki) flew 51 sorties over Japan with Pumpkin Bombs, or bombs the same size and weight as the Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki, filled with conventional explosives. The sorties were for training purposes in the use of such large and heavy bombs.

Potsdam Conference (between Germany and Poland): Truman, Churchill and Stalin urge Japan to surrender

Potsdam (Berlin). Stalin has asked to postpone the meeting with Churchill and Truman by a day because he is not feeling well. Truman, who has just learned of the success of the Trinity test, uses the day to visit the ruins of Berlin. In his diary (released in 1979), he writes: “I fear that machines are centuries ahead of morals, and when morals catch up, perhaps there will be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet, and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet, there’ll be a reckoning—who knows?”

Monday afternoon. Manhattan Project scientists John Magee and Joseph Hirschfelder drive along the path of the radioactive cloud. At a convenience store at an intersection, an elderly gentleman exclaims when he sees them: “You boys must have been up to something this morning: the sun rose in the west and went down again!”

A span of exactly 24 years separates two defining events of the 20th century: the first nuclear explosion in history and the launch of Apollo 11 to the Moon. Two events made possible by two contradictory, and therefore truly characteristic, figures of the short century: Robert J. Oppenheimer and Wernher von Braun. Both events occurred in a nation, the United States, which until a few years earlier was mired in the Great Depression, which knew nothing of nuclear physics or rockets to the Moon; indeed, Robert Goddard was derided by the New York Times for his experiments with liquid-fueled rockets aimed at deep space.

Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico. After the bomb explodes, Richard Feymman is probably the only person present to watch the explosion directly with the naked eye, through only the window of the jeep. Indeed, he reasons, if it’s neutrons, gamma rays, or X-rays that are damaging the retina, there’s no point even turning away: your head or any object would be hit anyway. A bunker or a thick lead shield would be needed. If, on the other hand, it’s ultraviolet light that’s damaging the retina, then ordinary glass will suffice. Finally, if it’s just light in the optical frequencies, but very intense, in the worst case scenario it would only cause temporary blindness.

Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, said of the moments after the bomb exploded: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people remained silent.” He then recalled that he himself had quoted some verses from the Hindu sacred text, Bagavagita: “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Aloud, after the explosion, he also recited the engineering commentary: “It worked.”

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

Saturday. Los Alamos, New Mexico. Captain James F. Nolan and Major Robert R. Furman transport the Hiroshima bomb uranium to Albuquerque, from where it will be transferred first to San Francisco, before embarking on the Indianapolis on Monday, July 16 (the day of the Trinity Site explosion). Thus, everything is being carried out on an assumption basis, without waiting for experimental confirmation, to gain time.

Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is read his sentence by the NKVD: eight years in a correctional camp. He exclaims, “But this is terrible! Eight years!!! Why?” His words ring hollow and useless. Other acquaintances of his have received 25 years (Stalin’s quarter). After some hesitation, he signs: he doesn’t know what else to do. After serving his sentence, he is released and immediately sentenced to perpetual confinement. In the Gulag, he develops a tumor, which is removed and then metastasized. He survives, against all odds. He will be freed by Khrushchev in 1956. In 1958, he conceives the beginning of the work that will become The Gulag Archipelago. In May 1968, he manages to have the microfilm of the book delivered to the West. Shortly afterwards he also met the physicist Andrei Sakharov, and Natalya Svetlova, a young mathematician who would become his second wife.