Between 1946 and 1952, the bomb would fundamentally transform the US government into an entity that would in many ways be unrecognizable from the one that was attacked at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Not only did the fate of the world rest in the hands of a single individual, as the author Garry Wills has described, but in just a few years a series of new policies and laws such as the Truman Doctrine,* the National Security Act of 1947, and the Marshall Plan* created a new national security state at home and reoriented US foreign policy abroad, making the containment of communism its top concern.
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