Editing The World Wars (section)

===The Manhattan Project===
{{topquote|Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.|Robert Oppenheimer}}
{{topquote|Now we are all sons of bitches.|Kenneth Bainbridge}}

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

The bombs weren't ready in time to use against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is [[Skub|controversial]] [[SJW|depending]] [[/pol/|on]] [[Communism|who]] [[Japan|you ask]], and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up at Pearl, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]]. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations, with the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in its last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. This committee dissolved itself on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.