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Soldiers & the Bomb. Except for one thing, 1945 would have been the year of the Allied military men, of Zhukov or Montgomery, of Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower or Nimitz, or—as in many respects it was—of G.I. Joe, an unwilling hero, not knowing what he was fighting for but fighting superbly well.
The biggest moments of 1945, save for that one thing, would have been the German surrender at Reims, the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri.
That one thing, the greatest of all 1945's great events, was the atom bomb.
In the light of the past, the significant fact about 1945 was that it was the last year of World War II. But in the light of the future, it was the first year in which civilization possessed, in the sober words of the Smyth Report, "the means to commit suicide at will."
What the world would best remember of 1945 was the deadly mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here were the force, the threat, the promise of the future. In their giant shadows, 45,000 feet tall, all men were pygmies.
The Assembly Line. If any one man had produced the atom bomb, he would have been the Man of 1945 without challenge. But science, as it became more complex, had become an assembly line, where individual men contributed a turn here and a tw.ist there, often without knowing what came off at the end.
The atom bomb was the creation of France's long-dead Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity, and the Curies, who discovered radium. It was the creation of Albert Einstein, sitting quietly in an old sweater, keeping his speculative pencil always pointed close to the secrets of physics.
In the Manhattan project were hundreds of creators and hundreds of others who helped make the creation possible. But all of them, by the very nature of the project, were workers in bits & pieces. Some of their names had become household words: Major General Leslie R. Groves and Dr. Vannevar Bush, the administrators; Drs. Compton and Fermi, the physicists; Drs. Urey and Lawrence, the atom crackers; and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, sometimes called "the smartest of the lot," who assembled the first bomb in New Mexico's desert fastness.
But in all this group there was no man to whom the others could point and say: "This is the one."
The Man at Line's End. It was no scientist who, by historic accident, somewhat unwittingly, somewhat against his own will, became more than any other man responsible for the bomb, its use in 1945 and its future. It was an ordinary, uncurious man without any pretensions to scientific knowledge, without many pretensions of any kind, a man of average size and weight, wearing bifocal glasses, fond of plain food, whiskey-&-water and lodge meetings. It was Harry Truman, 32nd President of the U.S.
In the '20s, when the tides of industry and empire were running with intoxicating speed, Harry Truman was content to be an obscure Missouri county judge. In the '30s, not by his own momentum but by the chance whim of a political boss, he was in the U.S. Senate. As 1945 began he was Vice President, a man struck by political lightning at the Chicago convention while eating a hotdog with mustard.