Just use
as.Date("2001-01-01") + 45
from base R, or date functionality in one of the many contributed packages. My RcppBDT package wraps functionality from Boost Date_Time including things like 'date of third Wednesday' in a given month.
Edit: And egged on by @Andrie, here is a bit more from RcppBDT (which is mostly a test case for Rcpp modules, really).
R> library(RcppBDT)
Loading required package: Rcpp
R>
R> str(bdt)
Reference class 'Rcpp_date' [package ".GlobalEnv"] with 0 fields
and 42 methods, of which 31 are possibly relevant:
addDays, finalize, fromDate, getDate, getDay, getDayOfWeek, getDayOfYear,
getEndOfBizWeek, getEndOfMonth, getFirstDayOfWeekAfter,
getFirstDayOfWeekInMonth, getFirstOfNextMonth, getIMMDate, getJulian,
getLastDayOfWeekBefore, getLastDayOfWeekInMonth, getLocalClock, getModJulian,
getMonth, getNthDayOfWeek, getUTC, getWeekNumber, getYear, initialize,
setEndOfBizWeek, setEndOfMonth, setFirstOfNextMonth, setFromLocalClock,
setFromUTC, setIMMDate, subtractDays
R> bdt$fromDate( as.Date("2001-01-01") )
R> bdt$addDays( 45 )
R> print(bdt)
[1] "2001-02-15"
R>