"Once you see it, the bomb is amazingly simple."
If ever an event in human history can be said to have been resolved by deus ex machina, the Second World War qualifies. By December 2, 1942, the Axis powers seemed to be on the verge of victory - in the east, German armies had seized Stalingrad and the north Caucasian oil fields, while in the west, the Western Allies' Operation Sledgehammer had been contained in Brittany and was slowly being pushed back into the sea. On the other side of the world, however, in an uninhabited valley north of Fontana Lake, TN, American scientists successfully tested the world's first atomic bomb.
When the so-called 'Manhattan Project' was authorized in January 1942, no one - not political leadership, not the military, nor its own scientists - expected such a quick result. The bomb turned out to be simple enough that arguably, any major power which had chosen to invest seriously into nuclear research could have produced one - as borne out by the rapid proliferation of atomic capabilities in the post-war era.
In April 1943, an atomic bomb was dropped over Essen - the first ever used in wartime. After this, the formidable Axis war machine quickly began to evaporate. In May, Marshall Petain abrogated the Armistice of Compiègne and brought France back to the Allied side. In July, a royal coup in Italy removed Mussolini from power and sought an armistice with the Allies. By October, American forces had entered the smoldering ruins of Berlin and by early November, Fuhrer Goring unconditionally surrendered the rest of Germany's forces.
The Allies' wartime unity began to fray almost as soon as the last shot was fired. The first and sorest flashpoint was the fate of eastern Poland, which remained under brutal Soviet occupation. The Polish government - returned from London to Warsaw to greet the victorious Home Army in early 1944 - and its British and French partners were enraged by Roosevelt's lack of willingness to press Stalin on the issue. Starting in 1945, President Wallace's even softer line on the Soviet Union and insistence on emphasizing the need for decolonization drove a even deeper wedge between the Western powers.
Similarly tense was the relationship between the restored French Fourth Republic in Paris, headed by Pierre Laval, and General de Gaulle's competing Free French faction, which retained control of much of France's African colonies. Britain withdrew its support for de Gaulle in mid-1943, but Washington continued to press for a power-sharing arrangement - something neither side was willing to accept.
On the far side of the world the victorious Kuomingtang government in China retained deep grudges against the Western powers for their perceived condescending attitude, betrayal of Chinese forces deployed to Burma, unwillingness to renegotiate the status of the remaining three Western colonies in China, and refusal to allow Chinese forces more than a symbolic role in the occupation of Japan.
Ten years have now passed since the end of the war, and the world has been divided into quarters. In the Western hemisphere, the United States under President Dewey seeks to balance the dual goals of dismantling the European empires while containing the spread of Communism. Across the Atlantic, the colonial powers of the Western Union - headed by Prime Minister Churchill and President Darlan - face the near-impossible task of simultaneously maintaining their global empires and keeping Soviet influence out of Eastern Europe. For its part, the Soviet Union under newly-minted Chairman Beria seeks to break the dual containment of the WU in the West and the Americans in the East by funding communist movements across the world - an approach which is increasingly successful in Asia and the Middle East. Finally, the so-called 'Fourth World,' led by the rising powers of China, India, and Egypt, seek to carve out new spheres of influence for themselves outside of the great powers of old.
