Attachment #4: Key Dates in World History: 1946 to 1999

• 1946 to 1991: The Cold War. The temporary alliance against Nazi Germany between the USSR and the US and other European countries dissolved into a bi-polar world of socialist and capitalist countries. East-West tensions subsided in the late 1980s with president Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms of perestroika (“reorganization”) and glasnost (“openness”).

• Between 1945 and 1991, decolonization and the division between the Western powers and the Soviet bloc defined the world. Empires dissolved into dozens of states, often as the result of small wars. But although decolonization transformed the map, the more powerful force was the ideological competition of the Cold War. After winning their independence, most countries quickly aligned themselves with either the democratic bloc or the communist bloc. Even those countries that did not want to choose sides nevertheless defined their identity in reference to the Cold War, forming a “nonalignment movement.”

• 1946, and on: Post-war decolonization.There was no single process of former colonies of European powers seeking independence. The unravelling of empires and the creation of a swath of new countries forever altered the balance of power within the United Nations and the political complexity of every region of the globe. Some occupied strategic locations, others possessed significant natural resources, and many were desperately poor. In 1946 there were 35 member states in the UN. This number swelled to 127 by 1970. The majority of new members had a few characteristics in common: they were non-white, with developing economies, facing internal problems that were the result of their colonial past, which sometimes put them at odds with European countries and made them suspicious of European-style governmental structures, political ideas, and economic institutions. (A significant number became ideological battlegrounds in the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.)

• 1946, Feb: The first wave of Canadian war brides arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 when 950 women and children disembarked from the RMS Mauretania. More than 48,000 war brides (women that Canadian servicemen married when they met overseas) and nearly 22,000 children chose Canada to be with their new families. Most new husbands had already gone home; the rest came with their wives

• 1946, March: The Five Eyes Agreement enacted, or officially UKUSA (United Kingdom-United States of America Agreement) and is the world’s oldest intelligence partnership. It is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. It uses communications methods, such as signals intelligence (SIGINT), to monitor the citizens of other FVEY member countries (the Five Eyes Alliance is abbreviated as FVEY in government documents). By monitoring each other’s citizens, FVEY can bypass domestic surveillance regulations. Due to its status as a secret treaty, its existence was not disclosed to the public until 2005 (See “2021, Sept”)

• 1946, March: Winston Churchill described the threat of Soviet Communism as an anti-democratic “Iron Curtain” descending across Europe. It was “a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization” signalling the start of the Cold War. Churchill’s speech in the US (after he was UK prime minister) was the first time anyone had used that now-common phrase to describe the Communist threat

• 1946, July: Civil War in China. Chiang Kai-shek launched a large-scale assault on Communist territory in North China with a total of 1.6 million troops. This marked the first stage of the final phase in the Chinese Civil War

• 1946, Sept: Mother Teresa decides to “help the poor and live among them”. When travelling by train to a convent in India for her annual retreat, she experienced what she later described as “the call within the call”.  She then went to the slums of Calcutta, India and established the “Missionaries of Charity” in 1950. She has since been canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta

• 1946, Nov: The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in a cave, including the oldest written version of the Ten Commandments. They are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered in at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine

• 1947, Feb: Imperial Oil made a major crude oil discovery near Leduc, Alberta. It provided the geological key to Alberta’s most prolific conventional oil reserves and resulted in a boom in petroleum exploration and development across Western Canada. It was the first of many large oil fields. As a consequence of the large finds, cheap and plentiful Alberta oil produced a huge surplus of oil on the Canadian Prairies, which had no immediate market since the major oil markets were in Ontario and Quebec. In 1949, Imperial Oil applied to the federal government to build the Interprovincial Pipeline (IPL) to Lake Superior, which allowed it to supply the Midwestern US. By 1956, the pipeline had been extended via Sarnia to Toronto; at 3,100 kilometres, it became the longest oil pipeline in the world. In 1953, the 1,200 kilometres Transmountain Pipeline was built from Edmonton to Vancouver, with an extension to northwest Washington. The pipelines did more to improve the energy security of the US than that of Canada since the Canadian government was more interested in Canada’s trade balance than in military or energy security. The Canadian government assumed that Eastern Canada could always import enough oil to meet its needs and that imported oil would always be cheaper than domestic 

• 1947, March: The Truman Doctrineannounced, leading to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This was an American foreign policy that originated with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was further developed in July 1948, when US President Harry Truman pledged to contain the communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey (through a dramatic speech to a joint session of congress he asks for US assistance for Greece and Turkey to forestall communist domination of the two nations). Direct American military force was not involved, but Congress appropriated financial aid to support the economies and militaries. More generally, the Doctrine implied American support for other nations thought to be threatened by Soviet communism. The Truman Doctrine became the foundation of American foreign policy, and led, in 1949, to the formation of NATO (See “1949, April”)

• 1947, April: Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball, starting at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, forever changing the complexion and history of the game

• 1947, June: The Doomsday Clock introduced; in 2023 the world is the closest now to global catastrophe it has ever been. Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. It is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. It is a metaphor for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technological advances. A hypothetical global catastrophe is represented by midnight on the clock, with the Bulletin’s opinion on how close the world is to one represented by a certain number of minutes or seconds to midnight. The main factors influencing the clock are nuclear risk and climate change. This ideogram is one of the most recognizable symbols in the past 100 years. In January 2023 the Bulletin moved the hands of the clock forward, largely because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock stands at 90 seconds to midnight – the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been

• 1947, June: Partition of Bengal, part of the Partition of India, divided the British Indian province of Bengal between the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The Hindu-majority West Bengal became a state of India, and the Muslim-majority East Bengal (now Bangladesh) became a province of Pakistan (See “1954, May”, 1965, Aug” and “2022, April”)

• 1947, Aug: Dissolution of the British Raj, i.e. crown rule in India. A border was drawn (the Radcliffe Line) creating the two self-governing independent Dominions of India (made up primarily of Hindus and Sikhs) and Pakistan (Muslim based) which was further bifurcated into East and West, with East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh in 1971. The partition of India and Pakistan was a lopsided event in the sense that it created a very strong India while Pakistan was very unstable and shaky. It took the British 300 years to build up their Indian Empire; they dismantled it in just 70 days in 1947

• 1947, Oct: The General agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was signed by 23 nations, including Canada. (Canada played a leading role in GATT.) It aimed to liberalize trade by reducing tariffs and removing quotas among member countries – to boost economic recovery after WWII. It helped the US-led capitalist West spread its influence by liberalizing trade during the Cold War. In 1995 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the GATT transitioned into the World Trade Organization – a truly global organization. It admitted former communist bloc countries (See “1991, Dec”)

• 1947, Oct: The Indo-Pakistani War of 1947–1948 (or the First Kashmir War) was an armed conflict between India and Pakistan fought over the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was the first of four Indo-Pakistani wars that was fought between the two newly independent nations. The long-running dispute over Kashmir has been the predominant cause of conflict between them. The inconclusive result of the war still affects the geopolitics of both countries (See “2019, Aug”)

• 1947, Oct: Chuck Yeager was the first man to exceed the speed of sound in flight. He was an  American test pilot and US Air Force officer. He flew 64 missions over Europe during WWII, shot down 13 German aircraft, and was himself shot down over France (he escaped capture with the help of the French underground). After the war he became a flight instructor and then a test pilot. He took a secret experimental X-1 aircraft, attached to a B-29 mother ship, to an altitude of 25,000 feet. The X-1 then rocketed separately to 40,000 feet, and Yeager became the first man to break the sound barrier, which was approximately 662 miles per hour at that altitude 

• 1947, Dec: The first transistor was successfully demonstrated at Bell Laboratoriesin Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs was the research arm of AT&T. (The metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, also known as the MOS transistor, which uses less power was invented in 1959, and has since become the most widely manufactured device in history.) John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain were joint winners of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the “transistor effect”. The important thing about a transistor is its binary property: open or shut was all it could be, no in-between. Those two states matched right up to the binary numbering system, which has only two digits, zero and one. Mathematicians knew that the binary system was just as powerful and accurate as the familiar ten-digit one inherited from the ancient Indians. While calculations took longer, that didn’t matter with a circuit board which draws a pattern with electricity, which travels at the speed of light. The introduction of the transistor is often considered one of the most important inventions in history (See “1925” and “1956”)

• 1947: The AK-47 submachine gun introduced; it is thought to be the most widely used firearm in history. It was first manufactured in the Soviet Union. It’s easy to use and carry (weighing around 10 pounds) and is accurate. It is the originating firearm of the Kalashnikov family of rifles. After more than eight decades since its creation, the AK-47 model and its variants remain one of the most popular and widely used firearms in the world

• 1948, Jan: Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a right-wing Hindu nationalist who considered him to have been too accommodating to Pakistan during the Partition of India of the previous year. Gandhi (1869-1948), as leader of the Indian National Congress, led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women’s rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending India’s caste system, ending untouchability and, achieving self-rule. He was deeply distressed by the religious partition of the country into Pakistan and India. I like this quote of his, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

• 1948: The worlds biggest conventional oil field was discovered in Saudi Arabia. Called Ghawar, it is by far the largest conventional oil field in the world (it is the largest both by both reserves and production),and accounts for roughly a third of the cumulative oil production of Saudi Arabia as of 2018

• 1948: The first commercially available transistor, the Raytheon CK703, went into production. The Regency TR-1, which used Texas Instruments’ NPN transistors, was the world’s first commercially produced transistor radio. The transistorized radio changed the world, opening up the information age. Information could quickly be scattered to the ends of the Earth. The first production commercial silicon transistor was announced by Texas Instruments in May 1954

• 1948, April: The Jeju uprising in South Korea. It was notable for its extreme violence; between 14,000 and 30,000 people (10% of Jeju Island’s population) were killed, and 40,000 fled to Japan. The methods used by the South Korean government to suppress protesters and rebels were especially cruel. Some historians regard the Jeju uprising as the true beginning of the Korean War

• 1948, April: The Marshall Plan(officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative enacted to provide foreign aid to Western Europe for economic recovery programs to their economies after the end of WWII. The US transferred $13.3 billion (equivalent of $173 billion in 2023). Aid was divided among the participant states roughly on a per capita basis. A larger amount was given to the major industrial powers, as the prevailing opinion was that their resuscitation was essential for the general European revival. Somewhat more aid per capita was also directed toward the Allied nations, with less for those that had been part of the Axis or remained neutral. The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the UK (receiving about 26% of the total). The next highest contributions went to France (18%) and West Germany (11%). Some eighteen European countries received Plan benefits. Although offered participation, the Soviet Union refused Plan benefits and also blocked benefits to Eastern Bloc countries, such as Romania and Poland. USSR developed its own economic recovery program, known as the Molotov Plan 

• 1948, May: The state of Israel founded. Also known as the Holy Land or Palestine, it is the birthplace of the Jewish people, the place where the final form of the Hebrew Bible is thought to have been compiled, and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity. In the course of history, the region has come under the sway of various empires and, as a result, has historically hosted a wide variety of ethnic groups. Today it contains sites that are sacred to many Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, Islam, Druzism, and  the Baháʼí Faith (See “1917, Nov”, “1967, June” and “2023, Oct 6”)

• 1948, May-1949, March: The First Arab-Israeli War resulted in an overwhelming Israeli victory on the ground, as well as the Palestinian Nakba (“the catastrophe”). (Israeli units drove back Syrian forces from the Golan Heights, took control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and drove Jordanian forces from the West Bank. Importantly, the Israelis were left in sole control of Jerusalem.) The civil war transformed into a conflict between Israel and the Arab states following the Israeli Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. Tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine. (Military conflicts have been fought between various Arab countries and Israel in 1948–49, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006.) As a result of the war, the State of Israel controlled the area that the UN had proposed for the Jewish state, as well as almost 60% of the area proposed for the Arab state, including the Jaffa, Lydda and Ramie area, Upper Galilee, some parts of the Negev and a wide strip along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Israel also took control of West Jerusalem, which was meant to be part of an international zone for Jerusalem and its environs. Transjordan took control of East Jerusalem and what became known as the West Bank, annexing it the following year, and the Egyptian military took control of the Gaza Strip. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in the area that became Israel, and they became Palestine refugees in what they refer to as the Nakba (“the catastrophe”). This destruction of Palestine society by Israel’s “War of Independence” is less well known (See “1948, May”, 1949, Dec” and “2023, Oct”)

• 1948, June: The Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) was formed to wage a war for national liberation against British colonial rule. It was a communist guerrilla army that fought for Malayan independence from the British Empire during the Anti–British National Liberation War (or the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960). The Malayan Union, formed April 1946,was a union of the Malay states and Penang and Malacca. It was the successor to British Malaya. The union was dissolved and replaced by the Federation of Malaya, which became fully independent in 1957. In 1963, the federation, along with North Borneo (Sabah), Sarawak and Singapore, formed the larger federation of Malaysia

• 1948, June: A new “long playing” record format introduced by Colombia Records that would spin at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute and would be made from unbreakable Vinylite (replacing 78 rpm made of brittle shellac). They held as much as 22 1/2 minutes of music vs the 78s that held 5 minutes 

• 1948, Dec: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris. This represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled. It built on the “Four Freedoms” – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. It starts off with “All humans beings are free and equal, endowed with reason and conscience.” Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR – six countries from the Soviet bloc, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia – no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles. The UDHR is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment, language and principles that were unimaginable before 1948

• 1949, April: The foundations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were officially laid down with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty (the Washington Treaty). It is an intergovernmental military alliance (also called the North Atlantic Alliance) currently between 31 member states – 29 European and two North American (Canada and US). It is a collective security system: its independent member states agree to defend each other against attacks by third parties. Canada was a founding member of NATO, and one of the first countries to propose the idea of a transatlantic defensive alliance. As Lester Pearson said as the signing of the treaty “This treaty is not a pact for war, but a pledge for peace and progress.” Working closely with their American and European colleagues, Canadian negotiators helped write the 14 articles of the North Atlantic Treaty. From the beginning, Canada emphasized that NATO needed to be more than just a military pact – it needed to promote political, economic and cultural bonds between its members. During the Cold War, NATO operated as a check on the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Members have agreed to reach or maintain the target defence spending of at least 2% of their GDP by 2024. (Sweden and Finland chose not to join until 2023.) (See “2023, April and “2023, Oct”) 

• 1949, May: West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany, was officially established.East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, was established in October 1949. Under their occupying governments, the two Germanys followed very different paths. (At the end of WWII, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, each controlled by one of the Allied powers: Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union. The German capital, Berlin, was similarly divided into four sectors, even though the entire city was located within the eastern part of Germany under Soviet control.) (See “1961, Aug” and “1989, Nov”)

• 1949, June: George Orwell published his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). He is also known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). The adjective “Orwellian – describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices – is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, Newspeak”, “memory hole”, “doublethink”, and “thoughtcrime”

• 1949, July: Eva (Evita) Perón formed the Peronista Feminist Party in Argentina. She was the wife of Juan Perón, the county’s president from 1946 to his overthrow in 1955, and again from 1973 to his death in July 1974

• 1949, Aug: The Soviet Union’s first test of a nuclear weapon kicked off the arms race (code-named “First Lightning”) in Kazakhstan, ending the US monopoly on nuclear weaponry and kicking off the arms race

• 1949, Sept: Indonesia gets independence. This was an armed conflict and diplomatic struggle between the Republic of Indonesia and the Dutch Empire. The revolution destroyed a colonial administration ruled from the other side of the world and is seen as the turning point of modern Indonesian history. The revolution marked the end of the colonial administration of the Dutch East Indies, except for New Guinea. By 1949 the Netherlands transferred sovereignty over the Dutch East Indies to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia

• 1949, Oct: Formation of a Communist government in China. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gained power over mainland China in 1949 and the Kuomintang (KMT)’s Nationalist Government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to the island of Taiwan (or Formosa – a former colony of the Empire of Japan ruled from 1895 to 1945), the US allied with, and recognized, the Republic of China as the sole government of China. Its paramount leader was Mao Zedong. Characterized as making up for 100 years of humiliation. From this date until the 1970s, China was closed off from the Western world (See “1839” and “1945”) 

• 1949, Dec: The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established. Itis a UN agency that supports the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees. UNRWA’s mandate encompasses Palestinians displaced by the Palestinian War (Israel’s war of independence – some 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes) and subsequent conflicts, as well as their descendants, including legally adopted children. It is the only UN agency that serves a specific group of refugees in a specific geographic area. UNRWA deems as refugees the descendants of all those whose “normal place of residence” was historic Palestine between June 1st 1946 and May 15th 1948 before being displaced. (The 1952 refugee convention defines one as a person who is actually “fleeing conflict and persecution”.) UNRWA employs over 30,000 people, most of them Palestinian refugees, and a small number of international staff and it is the lifeline for millions, especially in Gaza and especially during the 2023 war (See “2023, Oct 6” and “2024, Jan”)

• 1950, Jan: Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had passed information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviets over a seven-year period beginning in 1942. A British court sentenced him to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist who came to the US to work on the US atomic bomb and was assigned to research facilities in New York and Los Alamos, N.M. He was able to pass along to the Soviets details of the plutonium and the uranium bombs and to describe the design and method of their construction. Their information advanced the Soviet atomic weapons program at least 18 months, according to the Senate-House Atomic Energy Committee, and it helped the Soviets explode their first atomic bomb in 1949. His case led to the exposure of an espionage ring that included atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in New York in 1953, and Harry Gold, a Philadelphia biochemist who was Dr. Fuchs’ contact with the Soviets. The Atomic Energy Committee said, “Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States but in the history of nations.” (See “1951, March”)

• 1950, Feb: The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was signed by China and the Soviet Union. The treaty was signed against the background of the establishment of China’s communist regime and the Cold War confrontation, resulting directly from Mao’s foreign policy directive of “leaning to one side” (siding with the socialist camp) and Stalin’s strategic and ideological considerations pertaining to the extension of Soviet influence in East Asia. The expiration of the treaty in 1979 allowed China to attack Vietnam, a Soviet ally, in the Third Indochina War as a response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia 

• 1950, Feb: The invention of the credit card. The first Diner Club credit cards were given out to 200 people, and were accepted by 14 restaurants in New York. It was joined in 1958 by American Express, who was the first to use plastic in their card instead of paper or cardboard 

• 1950, April: A top secret US National Security Council policy paper made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority. Developed for President Truman, the highlyclassified document, NSC 68 (the United States Objectives and Programs for National Security) advocated a large expansion in the military budget, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies. It also rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente and containment of the Soviet Union. This ideologically charged document established the parameters of US policy throughout the Cold War. Juxtaposed against that free society was “the slave society” of the Soviet Union, which demanded “total power over all men within the Soviet state without a single exception” along with “total power over all Communist Parties and all states under Soviet domination.” NSC-68 made a case for American hegemony. “In a shrinking world,” the document asserted, “the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.” This fact imposed on the United States “the responsibility of world leadership” along with an obligation “to bring about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.” Washington committed itself to establishing a dominant military configured as a global police force. The necessity of US military supremacy – whether measured by Pentagon spending, the number of bases abroad, or a propensity to use force – has become an article of faith

• 1950-54: The Joseph McCarthy-led communist witch hunt took place in the US (the Red Scare). McCarthy, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. In 1954 Edward R. Murrow, host of CBS’s See It Now, showed a highlight reel of McCarthy’s worst moments and warned the public that “we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty”. This started the end of McCarthy’s witch hunt

• 1950, June: Start of the Korean War. Sometimes referred to as the “Forgotten War,” it was fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953. It started shortly after WW II and ended just before the Vietnam War, yet received a small amount of press coverage in the US compared to either of those conflicts, and continues to receive relatively little attention to this day. Yet the Korean War was one of the most significant wars of the 20th century. It permanently altered the geopolitical landscape of Asia, set the stage for future Cold War conflicts such as the Vietnam War, and heightened tensions between the US and Soviet Union that lasted for decades. As the first “hot” conflict of the Cold War, it pitted South Korea, backed by the US and a coalition of capitalist nations, against communist North Korea, backed by China and the Soviet Union. The war began when North Korea invaded South Korea following clashes along the border and rebellions in South Korea. North Korea was supported by China and the Soviet Union while South Korea was supported by the US and allied countries. The conflict killed as many as 4 million Koreans, amounting to 10% of the population. The fighting ended with an armistice July 1953. Korea remained divided into two hostile states but the armistice has kept the fighting at bay even though it didn’t settle many of the major political issues. (A Russia/Ukraine model?)

• 1950, Sept: A daring landing in the Korean War caused North Korea to retreat. This amphibious landing by US and South Korean forces at the port of Inch’ŏn, near the South Korean capital, Seoul. An operation, executed a wild gamble under extremely difficult conditions by US Gen. Douglas MacArthur, suddenly reversed the tide of the war after weeks of North Korean advances. He launched a surprise attack on a fortified site behind enemy lines, forcing the invading North Korean army to retreat in disorder up the Korean peninsula

• 1950, Oct: The Turing test, in artificial intelligence, was proposed by the English mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether a computer can “think.” It was originally called the imitation game by Turing and is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. The question of whether it is possible for machines to think has a long history, which is firmly entrenched in the distinction between dualist and materialist views of the mind. René Descartes prefigures aspects of the Turing test in his 1637 Discourse on the Method  (See “1637”) 

• 1951, March: American citizens, Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, were convicted for theft of atomic secrets for Russia in the most sensational atomic spying case of the cold war. The judge held the Rosenbergs responsible for putting into the hands of the Russians data about the A-bomb years before the best US scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb. They were executed two years later (See “1950, Jan”)

• 1951: The “Man in the Hathaway Shirt” who had an eye patch advertising campaign became hugely successful well into the 1980s. Hathaway grew to become the second-largest shirtmaker in the US after David Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather developed this campaign. The patch was both distinctive and helped accentuate the idea of an aristocratic man with a colourful life. Images that had a strong sense of story appeal performed significantly better than average in terms of capturing attention

• 1951, Sept: US-Japan Security Treaty signed. It permits the presence of US military bases on Japanese soil. The treaty was modified by 1959 and committed the US to defend Japan in an attack and required prior consultation with Japan on certain issues

• 1951, Oct: Operation Hudson Harbor became an international nuclear issue. It was a US Air Force Nuclear Strike training operation against North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union during the Korean War that was never escalated further. President Truman sent nine nuclear bombs with fissile cores on mock runs to Okinawa and North Korea on nuclear-capable B-29s. However by that summer the war had largely devolved into skirmishes in a narrow zone around the 38th parallel, and armistice talks were underway. But Truman did say that he would take whatever steps necessary to win the war

• 1951, Oct: Tibet came under the control of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after a Seventeen Point Agreement was signed (the Dalai Lama ratified it but later repudiated this on the grounds that he rendered his approval for the agreement while under duress.) The series of events came to be called the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” by the Chinese government and the “Chinese invasion of Tibet” by the Tibetan Government and the Tibetan diaspora indicating the extent of the conflict and Chinese manipulation. The Government of Tibet and the Tibetan social structure remained in place in the Tibetan polity under the authority of China until the 1959 Tibetan uprising (the protests were fueled by anti-government sentiment and separatism), when the Dalai Lama fled into exile. This is a tragic outcome for this historically independent kingdom (See “1959, March”)

• 1952, July: A coup d’etat toppled King Farouk of Egypt by the Free Officers Movement, a group of army officers led by Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Revolution ushered in a wave of revolutionary politics in the Arab world, and contributed to the escalation of decolonization, and the development of Third World solidarity during the Cold War. In June 1953, the revolutionary government formally abolished the monarchy, ending 150 years of the Muhammad Ali dynasty’s rule, and Egypt was declared a republic

• 1952, Oct: National Hockey League’s first televised game in Canada. The Montreal Canadians beat the Detroit Red Wings. Hockey Night in Canada still ranks as Canada’s longest running TV program

• 1952, Oct: Opening in London’s West End of The Mousetrap, the longest running play in the world. It is a murder mystery play by Agatha Christie. As of 2022 the play has been seen by 10 million people in London

• 1952, Oct: The United Kingdom became the third country (after the US and the Soviet Union) to develop and test nuclear weapons, and is one of the five nuclear-weapon states under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The UK initiated a nuclear weapons programme during World War II. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943, it was merged with the American Manhattan Project. The British contribution to the Project saw British scientists participate in most of its work. The British government considered nuclear weapons to be a joint discovery but the Americans restricted other countries, including the UK, from access to information about nuclear weapons. Fearing the loss of Britain’s great power status, the UK resumed its own project. Since the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement, the US and the UK have cooperated extensively on nuclear security matters. Since 1963 the US supplied the UK with Polaris missiles and nuclear submarine technology. Then the UK were allowed to purchase Trident II missiles. The delivery system consists of four submarines based in Scotland, with each submarine armed with up to sixteen Trident II missiles (See “1960, Feb”)

• 1952, Nov: The US detonates the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, on Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific – one that’s massively more destructive than the atomic bomb. (Weeks earlier, the United Kingdom tested its first nuclear weapon.) The test gave the US a short-lived advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. However in 1953 the USSR did the same. (By the late 1970s, seven nations had constructed hydrogen bombs. It is now estimated that roughly 12,700 nuclear warheads exist in the world.)

• 1952, Dec: The first serious nuclear reactor accident in the world occurred at Canada’s Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, about 200 kilometres northwest of Ottawa. A series of failures led to a brief surge, melting some of the reactor fuel rods and maxing out at about three times the facility’s power. No one was killed or seriously injured. It was significant for the changes to reactor safety and design it helped usher in. As one of the most powerful devices of its kind in the world, the NRX reactor was primarily used to probe the nuclear properties of matter and help advance reactor technology towards the goal of generating electricity. It began operations in 1947 and vaulted Canada into a world-leading position. In the early days of cancer radiation therapy, it provided the world’s only ready source of the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60. Less public was the use of the reactor by the US Navy to test the uranium oxide fuel it was developing for use in the first nuclear powered submarine (See “1945, Sept”)

• 1953, Jan: Dwight Eisenhower, Republican, becomes president of the US and serves to 1961. Note: in 1961 John F. Kennedy succeeded him until his assassination in 1963; then came Lyndon Baines Johnson (D) from 1963 to 1969; then came Richard Nixon (R) from 1969 until he faced impeachment and resigned in 1974; he was succeeded by Gerald Ford, whom he had appointed vice president in 1973, and who pardoned him in September 1974: Ford was president (R) 1974 to ‘77 

• 1953, Feb: Death of the dictator Joseph Stalin. He ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, becoming one of the most powerful and murderous dictators in history. He was a communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism. In spite of his reign of terror that caused tens of millions to die, he remained “Uncle Joe,” the “father” of all Russians to his final days

• 1953, April: The structure of DNA, the human genetic code, discovered. The discovery by James Watson, an American molecular biologist and geneticist, and Francis Crick, an English molecular biologist and biophysicist was that DNA is composed of two chains that twist around each other to form a double helix. DNA is the molecule that carries the genetic code underlying every living thing, i.e. the hereditary material that forms individual human beings (See “1962, Oct”)

• 1953, May: Mount Everest climbed for the first time by Tenzing Norgay (a Nepali-Indian Sherpa mountaineer) and Edmund Hillary (a New Zealand mountaineer). It is the Earth’s highest mountain at 29,032 feet 

• 1953, May: The McDonald brothers opened their first golden arches design fast-food restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona. Then in 1954, Ray Kroc, a seller of milkshake machines, got involved and assumed the rights to set up McDonald’s restaurants throughout the US. He decided to own the real estate upon which future franchises would be built and procure mortgages for both land and buildings, and pass these costs on to the franchisee with a 20-40% markup and a reduced initial deposit. McDonald’s has grown to the world’s largest restaurant chain by revenue

• 1953, June: The coronation of Elizabeth II. She acceded to the throne to become queen at the age of 25 upon the death of her father, George VI, on 6 February 1952. She had made her first visit to Canada (of 22 visits) as Princess Elizabeth in 1951

• 1953, Dec: The first issue of Playboy magazine was published by Hugh Hefner. At its height in 1971 it sold 7 million copies. With its iconic logo of a rabbit with a tuxedo bow tie, a nude female centrefold, the Playboy interviews and cartoons and liberal editorial stance, it played an important role in the sexual revolution, and remains one of the world’s best-known brands

• 1954, April 11: The single most boring day in history was determined. According to the artificial intelligence project True Knowledge, which indexed hundreds of millions of facts, a query was put to it to determine the single most boring day in history. The answer was April 11, 1954. The program determined that a Turkish academic was born that day – his field is electrical engineering – but reported that nothing else particularly significant happened

• 1954, April: The 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement, also called the Panchsheel Agreement, was signed by China and India. (It is officially the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse Between Tibet Region of China and India.) The preamble of the agreement stated the panchsheel, or the five principles of peaceful coexistance, that China proposed and India favoured. (Those principles are: i. Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, ii. Mutual non-aggression, iii. Mutual non-interference, iv. Equality and mutual benefit, and v. Peaceful co-existence.) The agreement reflected the adjustment of the previously existing trade relations between Tibet and India to the changed context of India’s decolonization and China’s assertion of suzerainty over Tibet. In the agreement Tibet was referred to, for the first time in history, as “the Tibet Region of China”

• 1954, April: The Soviet Union transferred the administration of Crimea from Soviet Russia to Ukraine. (Ukraine’s territory had expanded during the Soviet period. Under the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in 1939, the two countries carved up eastern Europe. In the ensuing fighting, what had been parts of Poland that were settled by Ukrainians were added to Soviet Ukraine.) (See “1939, Aug”)

• 1954, May: USSR’s bid to join NATO was rejected on grounds that the USSR’s membership of the organization would be incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims. USSR had suggested that it join NATO as it feared the restoration of German militarism in West Germany.Moscow hit back, establishing an Eastern counterpart, dubbed the Warsaw Pact. The struggle for global dominance, known as the Cold War, is now rolling

• 1954: Egypt decided to build the new Aswan High Dam and protect the affected cultural treasures. The resulting reservoir was expected to inundate a large stretch of the Nile valley containing cultural treasures of ancient Egypt and ancient Nubia. In 1959, the governments of Egypt and Sudan requested UNESCO to assist them to protect and rescue the endangered monuments and sites (the most famous of these are the temple complexes of Abu Simbel and Philae). The International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia resulted in the excavation and recording of hundreds of sites, the recovery of thousands of objects, as well as the salvage and relocation to higher ground of several important temples. The dam was finished July 1970 (See “1956, July” and “1967, June”)

• 1954, Oct: The first commercial transistor radio was released, the Regency TR-1. Texas Instruments and Regency Division of I.D.E.A., were the first to offer a production model.The use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes as the amplifier elements meant that the device was much smaller, lighter, and required far less power to operate than a tube radio, and was more resistant to physical shock. The mass-market success of the smaller and cheaper Sony TR-63, released in 1957, led to the transistor radio becoming the most popular electronic communication device of the 1960s and 1970s. Transistor radios are still commonly used as car radios. Billions of transistor radios are estimated to have been sold worldwide between the 1950s and 2012. The pocket size of transistor radios sparked a change in popular music listening habits, allowing people to listen to music anywhere they went

• 1954, May: The US Supreme Court ruled that state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. This landmark decision (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka) paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the US civil rights movement 

• 1954, May: Running the mile in under four minutes was first achieved by British athlete Roger Bannister at Oxford University. Two months later, during the British Empire Games in Vancouver, Australia’s John Landy and Bannister, both ran the distance in under four minutes. The race’s end is memorialized in a photo of the two, with Landy looking over his left shoulder, just as Bannister is passing him on the right. The record has been lowered by almost 17 seconds, and currently stands at 3:43.13, by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco in 1999

• 1954, May: Military Aid Pact between US and Pakistan. Pakistan and the US drew closer together and entered into a Mutual Defence Assistance Agreement. It also resulted in Pakistan’s joining of SEATO and the Baghdad Pact, later the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). By signing these defence pacts, Pakistan was guaranteed military and economic aid. Their army was transformed into a well-organized and well equipped force working on the modus operandi of US forces. Also, Pakistan’s position was that the threat of Indian aggression was more a great evil than communism. Pakistan felt that the US betrayed it by giving aid to India and leaving her in the lurch at a critical juncture of the 1965 war when Pakistan desperately needed its ally (See “1954, Sept”, 1965, Aug” and “2022, April”)

• Note: The strategic location of Pakistan is of some significance. West Pakistan borders on the Middle East, is close to Russia’s southern frontier and shares a common border with China. It stands across the great mountain passes through which all land invasions of the Indian sub-continent have taken place in history. East Pakistan, on the other hand, borders on Myanmar (Burma). Thus West Pakistan and East Pakistan flank India on her northwest and on her northeast. So situated, Pakistan virtually constitutes a defensive shield for India. It constitutes also the gateway to South Asia. It should therefore be in the interest of world peace, particularly of India’s security, that Pakistan remain strong and stable (See “1960, Sept”)

• 1954, June: The USSR’s Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant became the world’s first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid. Although its production of electricity for the grid ceased in 1959, it remained in operation until 2022; thereafter it functioned as a research and isotope production plant only

• 1954, June: China’s Chou En-lai visits with Jawaharlal Nehru of India to inhibit American Southeast Asian influence. From the archives an interesting cable has emerged from Chou (or Zhou) that reads: “We will not initiate involvement with the dispute between India and Pakistan, [but if we become involved] we will emphasize that South East Asian countries should unite against the invasion of the United States.” And another: “The purpose of this visit to India is to conduct preparation work for signing some form of Asian peace treaty and to strike a blow at the United States’ conspiracy to organize a Southeast Asia invasive bloc.” 

• 1954, July: Rationing finally eliminated on meat in Britain. During WWII ration books were issued to every person, allowing for the purchase of only a set amount of certain basic goods. At first it was gasoline, then sugar, tea, bacon, eggs, milk and cheese. Then a point system was used for other items. Non-food product supply was also curtailed (soap, paper, clothing). Post-war Britain still struggled with shortages until controls were finally eliminated 

• 1954, July: Vietnam divided into two. France and the Viet Minh signed the Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam, dividing Vietnam into two provisional states at the 17th parallel of latitude. The International Control Commission (ICC) is set up. Canada represented the democratic West; Poland represented the communist alliance

• 1954, Sept: The US, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO. The purpose of the organization was to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region. Although called the “Southeast Asia Treaty Organization,” only two Southeast Asian countries became members. The Philippines joined in part because of its close ties with the US and in part out of concern over the nascent communist insurgency threatening its own government. Thailand, similarly, joined after learning of a newly established “Thai Autonomous Region” in Yunnan Province in South China, expressing concern about the potential for Chinese communist subversion on its own soil (See “1954, May”)

• 1955, Feb: The Middle East Treaty Organization (METO) established. Also known as the Baghdad Pact, it was a military alliance of the Cold War. It was formed by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and the UK. Its goal was to contain the Soviet Union (USSR) by having a line of strong states along the Soviet Union’s southwestern frontier. Similarly, it was known as the ‘Northern Tier’ to prevent Soviet expansion into the Middle East. The alliance was dissolved in 1979

• 1955, April: Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that protects against polio. Known as “infantile paralysis” because polio mainly affected children but that changed (my father was completely paralyzed by polio in 1957). Since the virus is easily transmitted, epidemics were commonplace in the first decades of the 20th century. The first major polio epidemic in the US occurred in Vermont in 1894, and by the 20th century thousands were affected every year. (Personal aside: my father contracted polio in March 1957 and spent months in an iron lung.) After the vaccine annual cases dropped by 1957 from 58,000 to 5,600, and by 1961, only 161 cases remained

• 1955, May: Austria gets independence. The republic was formally reestablished in its pre-1938 frontiers as a “sovereign, independent and democratic state.”A treaty was signed in Vienna by the representatives of four powers (the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, France) and Austria and arranged for the withdrawal of all occupation forces. The minority rights of the Slovene and Croat minorities were also expressly detailed. Austrian neutrality was declared by parliament in October, after the last Allied troops left

• 1955, Nov: The world’s first purpose-built container vessel was Clifford J. Rodgers, built in Montreal in 1955 and owned by the White Pass and Yukon Corporation. Her first trip carried 600 containers between North Vancouver, British Columbia, and Skagway, Alaska, 1955. In Skagway, the containers were unloaded to purpose-built railroad cars for transport north to Yukon, in the first intermodal service using trucks, ships, and railroad cars. Southbound containers were loaded by shippers in Yukon and moved by rail, ship, and truck to their consignees without opening. This first intermodal system operated from November 1955 until 1982. Dozens of incompatible container systems emerged so they standardized containerization globally. The effects of containerization rapidly spread beyond the shipping industry. Containers were quickly adopted by trucking and rail transport industries for cargo transport not involving sea transport (See “1931, Feb”)

• 1955, Nov-1975, April: The Vietnam War. A conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from November 1,1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 30, 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was a major conflict of the Cold War. While the war was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, the north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist states, while the south was supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies, making the war a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. It lasted almost 20 years, with direct US military involvement ending in 1973. The conflict also spilled over into neighbouring states, exacerbating the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three countries officially becoming communist states by 1976 (See “1964, Aug”, “1973, Jan” and “1975, April”)

• 1955, Dec: A black Rosa Parks arrested and fined for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.In 1955, the law in Alabama required African Americans to give up their seats to whites if the bus was full.This led to major campaigns of civil resistance and acts of nonviolent protest. In December 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court banned all segregation on public transportation. In 1999, the US Congress recognized Parks as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”

• 1956, Feb: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech that was sharply critical of the rule of the General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin (who died in 1953), particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the last years of the 1930s. Speaking to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism. The speech (On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences) was leaked to the West by the Israeli intelligence agency. The speech was shocking in its day due to the revelations of Stalin’s use of terror. It resulted in confusion among many Soviet citizens who were raised on the permanent praise of the “genius” of Stalin. The speech was cited as a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split by China (under Chairman Mao Zedong) who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. The speech was a milestone in the Khrushchev Thaw when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed due to Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence with other nations

• 1956, June: The start of the US Interstate Highway System; it was called the greatest public works act in history. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the act. It was considered a major element in bringing America together. The construction of the system cost approximately $114 billion (equivalent to $597 billion in 2022). The system has continued to expand and grow as additional federal funding has provided for new routes to be added. Though heavily funded by the federal government, Interstate Highways are owned by the state in which they were built. As of 2020, about one quarter of all vehicle miles driven in the country used the Interstate Highway System, which has a total length of 48,756 miles

• 1956: Approximate start date for the establishment of Silicon Valley in California, and the resultant development of break-through technologies leading to the making of the personal computer. Gordon Moore (of 1965 Moore’s Law fame and eventual founder of Intel; see “1968, July”) joined (as chief chemist) William Shockley, who had left Bell Labs and set up his own company, Shockley Transistors. A group of eight then broke off and formed in 1957, a new company that was to change everything – Fairfield Semiconductor. They invented (driven by the skills of Jean Amédée Hoerni) the planar process, an important technology for reliably fabricating and manufacturing semiconductor devices and as well producing the circuitry integrated. The result being that the circuits could be printed onto the silicone wafer photographically, employing the same principle that is used in photographic enlargers. Suddenly it became possible to miniaturize the circuitry, to make electronics of ever-increasing speed and power and ever-decreasing size. The transistors in these circuits, with just the application of tiny bursts of power, could be switched on and off and on and off ceaselessly and very swiftly. Thus they became crucial to making computers (See “1959, May”)

• 1956, July: The Suez Canal crisis; Egypt gains control of the canal. Egyptian President Nasser nationalizes the British and French-owned Suez Canal. Egypt’s stated reason for the nationalization of the canal was to use the shipping tolls to finance construction of the Aswan Dam (and the US and Britain had reversed their decision to finance it). In response, Israel invaded Egypt in late October, and British and French troops landed in November. The aims were to regain control of the Suez Canal for the Western powers and to remove president Nasser. Under Soviet, US, and UN pressure, all three countries withdrew and Egypt regained control of the canal and reopened it to commercial shipping. It has been said that the crisis signified the end of Great Britain’s role as one of the world’s major powers. The Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was NOT put in his place. The ensuing debacle resulted in a singular humiliation that cost British Prime Minister Anthony Eden his job. Eden’s rival, British Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, described the Suez operation as “an act of disastrous folly” that did “irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country.” As a result of the conflict, the United Nations created the UN Emergency Force to police the Egyptian-Israeli border, British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned, and Canadian external affairs minister Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in resolving the crisis through the UN. (The selection committee argued that Pearson had “saved the world”.) (See “1869, Nov” and “1957, Oct”)

• 1956, Oct: Canada and the US sign the Defence Production Sharing Agreement allowing Canadian firms to compete on an equal footing with their American counterparts in the US market

• 1956, Nov: The idea, developed by Canada’s Lester Pearson, for the UN’s first, large-scale peacekeeping force, was approved by the UN General Assembly. No country voted against the peacekeeping mission. At that time, UN military observers were already being used to monitor cease-fire agreements in Kashmir and Palestine, but a more robust and armoured peacekeeping force had not been tried before. In the midst of the Suez Crisis, Pearson made his case for a “peace and police force,” saying: “Peace is far more than ceasing to fire.” However, British and French paratroops ignored the vote and landed in the Canal Zone. The US continued to pressure British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden to find a peaceful resolution. A cease-fire was arranged, beginning in November, and UN peacekeepers later entered the canal area. Pearson’s solution allowed Britain, France and Israel to withdraw their forces without giving the appearance of having been defeated. A United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) under the command of a Canadian General was in place by late November

• 1956, Nov: A spontaneous national uprising takes place in Hungary; Soviet forces crush Budapest.The uprising demanded a more democratic political system and freedom from Soviet oppression. It lasted 12 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops.TheSoviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had pledged a retreat from the Stalinist policies and repression of the past, but the violent actions in Budapest suggested otherwise. This nationwide revolution against the one-party Hungarian socialist state and its Soviet-imposed policies was the first major threat to Soviet control since the Red Army drove Nazi Germany from its territory at the end of WWII. Hungary was the country where Soviet-style Communism would begin to lose its appeal. Nikita Khrushchev’s view was that if the “counterrevolution” got out of hand in Hungary, he would have to intervene. It did, and he did. The Hungarian uprising had a shattering impact on the shape of world affairs. To quote historian Tony Judt “1956 represented the defeat and collapse of the revolutionary myth so successfully cultivated by Lenin and his heirs”. The failure of Communism in Hungary was important (See “1991, March”)

• 1957, Feb-1958: A viral pandemic, influenza A virus subtype H2N2, emerged in East Asia (“Asian Flu”). It reached coastal cities in the US in 1957. Worldwide deaths were 1.1 million, and 116,000 in the US. (It disproportionally affected ages 0-4 and those 60 and up.) The number of excess deaths caused by the pandemic is estimated to be 1 to 4 million around the world, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history 

• 1957, March: Treaty establishing the European Economic Union (EEC).Two treaties were signed at the same time – the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom) 

• 1957, Aug: Malaya gained independence from the British Empire. The Federation of Malaysia, comprising the states of the Federation of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore, was officially declared in 1963. Singapore separated from Malaysia to become an independent republic in August 1965

• 1957, Aug: Canada and the US sign NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command). This was a pact made at the height of the Cold War. It placed under joint command the air forces of Canada and the US. Canada and the US renewed NORAD in 2006, making the arrangement permanent. It is subject to review every four years

• 1957, Sept: Nine Black high school students were escorted into the Little Rock Central High School school by the US army. This event, watched by the nation and world, was the site of the first important test for the implementation of the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954

• 1957, Oct: Canada’s Lester Pearson wins Nobel Peace Prize for helping to coax superpowers back from the brink of war when they had faced off over Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Pearson was Canada’s secretary of state for external affairs (foreign minister) and headed Canada’s delegation to the UN. He organized the UN Emergency Force to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis, which earned him attention worldwide (See “1956, July”)

• 1957, Oct: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is established in Vienna as a forum for international cooperation on civilian nuclear research. Unanimously approved by more than eighty countries, the IAEA’s charter outlines a three-part mission: nuclear verification and security, safety, and technology transfer. The IAEA’s first safeguards for civilian nuclear facilities are established in 1961

• 1957, Oct: Soviets were the first nation to successfully launch the first man-made satellite into space, Sputnik 1. Just days before, on a modified version of the rocket that powered Sputnik, the Soviets conductedthe world’s first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), seen as capable of striking U.S. territory. Then one month later they launched Sputnik 2 with a dog, Laika. The satellite’s unanticipated success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, part of the Cold War. Since then, more than 6,500 have been launched

• 1957, Oct: Just days after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, two US physicists were able to determine accurate location information (thus the Global Positioning System orGPS emerged). The two physicists at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, used the radio signals emanating from the satellite to determine Sputnik’s orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift of its radio signals during a single pass. Next the inverse problem was investigated: pinpointing the user’s location. Fast forward to 1973 and the Navstar Global Positioning System (See “1960” and “1973”)

• 1957, Nov: Canada’s National Research Universal (NRU) Reactor begins operation. This $57 million reactor at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories was hailed as the free world’s most powerful research reactor. The NRU became a crucial step on the way to the first commercial scale CANDU reactors in the 1960s. During the later part of its operation lifetime, the NRU reactor was best known as one of the world’s largest suppliers of medical isotopes. It was decommissioned in 2018 (See “1945, Sept”)

• 1957, Dec: A resolution on peaceful co-existence jointly presented by India, Yugoslavia and Sweden was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly. It was based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (which are the Chinese government’s foreign relations principles first mentioned in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement, also known as Panchsheel). An underlying assumption of the Five Principles was that newly independent states after decolonization would be able to develop a new and more principled approach to international relations

• 1958-1961: Mao’s “The Great Leap Forward”. This was the second five year plan of the People’s Republic of China led by the Communist Party of China. Mao Zedong, Chairman of the CPC launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through taking land from the peasants and the formation of people’s communes. Private ownership was abolished. The policies caused economic disaster and led to the Great Chinese Famine where millions (estimates run from 20 to 55 million!) starved making it the deadliest famine in history

• 1958, Jan: US launched the satellite Explorer 1, beginning the US Space Age. It became the first successfully launched satellite by the US and a quick response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1. It accidentally discovered that Earth is encircled by donuts of intense radiation held in place by its magnetic field. They were subsequently named Van Allen belts after James Van Allen, the University of Iowa scientist who discovered them. Explorer 1’s success marked the beginning of the US Space Age

• 1958, July: A coup d’état resulted in the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq establishing the Iraqi Republic that had been established by King Faisal I in 1921 under the auspices of the British. King Faisal II, Prince ‘Abd al-Iliah, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said were executed by the military. The coup established the Iraqi Republic. The new government was led by General Abdul Karim Qasim who withdrew Iraq from the Baghdad Pact, opened diplomatic relations with Soviet Union and adopted a non-aligned stance. The revolution that broke out in Iraq has been described as a “Landmark in the history of the Middle East”

• 1958 July: NASA created. The US, under President Dwight Eisenhower created the “National Aeronautics and Space Agency” (NASA). The objective was ‘the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space”. Then in December Project Mercury was created to send a man into orbit and return 

• 1958, Dec: The John Birch Society, an American right-wing political advocacy group, was founded by the businessman Robert Welch. It is anti-communist, supports social conservatism, and is associated with ultraconservative, radical right, far-right, or libertarian ideas. It was the most robust political fringe group of its day, intent upon thwarting any US-Soviet cooperation, withdrawing America from the United Nations, exposing Communists in the federal government, and impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren. While the organization’s influence peaked in the 1970s, it has been argued that “Bircherism” and its legacy of conspiracy theories have become the dominant strain in the US conservative movement

• 1958-62: Thalidomide drug scandal. This drug was a sedative given to pregnant women to control morning sickness, but it caused horrible birth defects. It resulted in the “biggest man-made medical disaster ever,” with more than 10,000 children born with a range of severe deformities. In the US, the FDA refused approval to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed. he disaster prompted many countries to introduce tougher rules for the testing and licensing of drugs

• 1959, Jan: Fidel Castro converted Cuba into a one-party, socialist state under Communist Party rule, adopting a Marxist–Leninist model of development, the first in the Western Hemisphere. He introduced central economic planning and expanded healthcare and education, accompanied by state control of the press and the suppression of internal dissent. He was the longest-serving non-royal head of state in the 20th and 21st centuries. Fulgencio Batista (the elected president of Cuba from 1940 to 1944 and the US-backed military dictator from 1952 to 1959) was warned of Castro, and fled into exile with over US$300 million. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was Castro’s chief lieutenant in the revolution and served as minister of industry in the new government; he was executed by the Bolivian army in 1967

• 1959, Feb: The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow (the “Arrow”) program was cancelled by Conservative PM John Diefenbaker. This resulted in the loss of at least 25,000 direct and indirect jobs. New research points to a diminished need for the costly aircraft in the evolving Cold War. The Soviet Union’s shift away from manned bombers to long-range ballistic missiles, suggests interceptors like the Arrow would increasingly play a smaller role in the defence of North America. Interestingly, the Canadian forecast of the capabilities of Soviet long-range aviation in the early 1960s proved to be broadly accurate, and the lower Canadian calculation of the number of Soviet operational heavy bombers was generally closer to reality than US estimates

• 1959, Feb: Plane crash killed rock ’n’ roll pioneers Buddy Holly, The Big Bopperand Ritchie Valens. Don McLean’s song “American Pie” immortalized it as “the day music died” (See “1971, Oct”)

• 1959, March: Tibetan uprising; the Dalai Lama flees Tibet. The Government of Tibet and the Tibetan social structure remained in place in the Tibetan polity under the authority of China until this uprising, when the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India after which the Government of Tibet and Tibetan social structures were dissolved. Regarding what will happen upon the death of the Dalai Lama (now 87), since 2007, Beijing has said it must approve all reincarnations of Tibet’s spiritual leader. China continues to expand the boarding school system dramatically; it now encompasses more than a million children on the Tibetan plateau. This appears part of the Chinese strategy of assimilating Tibetans into the majority Han culture. (See “1951, Oct”)

• 1959: The first monolithic integrated circuit board (IC chip) was invented by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. By setting the transistors to open or shut, a person could shape the pattern of the current’s flow. And this could be done with a program, a coded set of instructions 

• 1959, May: Jean Amédée Hoerni first patented the planar process which proved to be one of the most important single advances in semiconductor technology. He did itwhile working at Fairchild Semiconductor. It wasused in the semiconductor industry to build individual components of a transistor, and in turn, connect those transistors together. It is the primary process by which silicon integrated circuit chips are built, and it is the most commonly used method of producing junctions during the manufacture of semiconductor devices (See “1956”)

• 1959: Volvo introduced the three-point car seat belt (designed by Nils Ivar Bohlin). They then released the design publicly, i.e. they gave away the patent. In 1985 the German Patent Office ranked it among the eight most important innovations of the previous 100 years

• 1959, Dec: The Antarctic Treaty was signed by the twelve nations that had been active during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-58 (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States and USSR). The Treaty applies to the area south of 60° South latitude. It makes the Earth’s only unoccupied continent a military-free, scientific nature preserve. Through this agreement, the countries active in Antarctica consult on the uses of a whole continent, with a commitment that it should not become the scene or object of international discord. Among a number of things it bans nuclear explosions and radioactive waste disposal. The Treaty came into effect June 1961 and now has 54 signatories

• 1960, Feb: France was the fourth country to test an independently developed nuclear weapon. There were 210 French nuclear tests from 1960 through 1995 (17 done in the Algerian Sahara and 193 in French Polynesia). The French military is currently thought to retain a weapons stockpile of around 300 operational (deployed) nuclear warheads, making it the third-largest in the world, speaking in terms of warheads, not megatons. France is the only member of the European Union to possess independent (non-NATO) nuclear weapons (See “1952, Oct”)

• 1960: The first true satellite navigation system became operational – a Doppler satellite navigation system known as Transit, was put into orbit. This allowed the US Navy a foolproof, secure, and accurate means of locating its fleet of Polaris-armed nuclear submarines. It went further and allowed US Navy ships anywhere in the world, at any time of the day or night, and in any weather, to learn their more-or-less exact position. It was in use until 1996 and the “largest step in navigation since the development of the shipboard chronometer” (See 1957, Oct”)

• 1960, March: The Sharpeville massacre in South Africa. After demonstrating against pass laws, a crowd of about 7,000 protesters went to the police station in Sharpeville. The police opened fire on the crowd when the crowd started advancing toward the fence around the police station. There were 69 people killed and 180 injured. The massacre was one of the catalysts for a shift from passive resistance to armed resistance by the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and African National Congress. This marked a turning point in South Africa’s history; the country found itself increasingly isolated in the international community 

• 1960, April: Brasil began relocating its capital from the sprawling coastal city of Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. Rio was the nation’s official capital for nearly 200 years. Unfortunately, it was also crowded, with congested roadways that made it difficult to travel to the administrative buildings spread across the city. Brasília was designed specifically for its purpose as the governing seat. Engineers, architects, and city planners worked together to create a capital city that was beautiful to visit and effortless to navigate, with numbered blocks and divided sectors for hotels, embassies, and banks. The capital of Brasília is such an achievement of modern architecture that it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. Unfortunately the city has now become two spatially segregated communities: the central planned city, with a mostly wealthy population, and the sprawling unplanned periphery, where the low- and middle-income individuals live without adequate infrastructure, services, and civic spaces 

• 1960, May:First oral birth control pill. Drug maker, Searle receives FDA approval to sell Enovid as a birth control pill. Searle is the first and and at this point the only pharmaceutical company to sell an oral contraceptive and it has a lucrative monopoly. The PILL has transformed the lives of millions and helped reshape the role of medicine in reproduction 

• 1960, May: The invention of the laser. Theodore Maiman developed the first working laser at Hughes Research Lab. The laser allows extremely narrow and precise focus over a long distance

• 1960, June: Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Started after the election of 1960 that installed the Liberal provincial government of Jean Lesage; it was characterized by the effective secularization of government, the creation of a state-run welfare state, as well as realignment of politics into federalist and sovereigntist (or separatist) factions (and the eventual election of a pro-sovereignty provincial government in the 1976 election)

• 1960, Sept: The Nixon-Kennedy debates are televised, marking the first network use of the split screen. Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA) performed better on television than Vice President Richard Nixon (R-CA), and it is believed that television helped Kennedy win the election

• 1960s: Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue seminal to the rise of satirical comedy in 1960s Britain. It was written and performed by Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett (1934-2019) and Jonathan Miller (1934-2019). It played in London’s West End and then in America, both on tour and on Broadway. Hugely successful, it is widely regarded as seminal to the rise of satirical comedy in 1960s Britain. (See also “1969, Oct” – the British sketch comedy troupe, Monty Python’s Flying Circus)

• 1960, Sept: Birth of OPEC(the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). The oil producing countries, mainly centred in the Middle East and the developing world began to flex their muscles and change the nature of the oil industry and alter the context of Middle Eastern politics. The founding members were Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Venezuela. This development weakened the grip of the Western oil companies on the setting of global oil prices

• 1960, Sept: The Paralympic Games first took place in Rome, Italy, featuring 400 athletes from 23 countries, following on from the Stoke Mandeville Games of 1948 and 1952. The only disability included then was spinal cord injury. Since then they have taken place every four years

• 1960, Sept: TheIndus Water Treaty (IWT), a water-distribution treaty between India and Pakistan, was signed. It is to use the water available in the Indus River and its tributaries, all fed by glaciers that are melting faster than they have been accumulating. It is estimated that between 1/3 and 2/3 of the ice mass in the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas will likely disappear by the end of the century. This Indus catchment area (which has three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan, and China) may become a dangerous flashpoint as this happens (See “1954, May”)

• 1960, Oct: Nigeria broke from colonial rule and was granted independence.  A new constitution established a federal system with an elected prime minister and a ceremonial head of state (See “1966, Jan”) 

• 1960, Oct: Formal launch of the present-day International System of Units, known generally by SI(initials derived from the French Système international d’unités). It is the modern form of the metric system and the world’s most widely used system of measurement. Coordinated by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (abbreviated BIPM from French: Bureau international des poids et mesures), it is the only system of measurement with an official status in nearly every country in the world; it is employed in science, technology, industry, and everyday commerce. (The only other types of measurement systems that still have widespread use across the world are the Imperial and US customary measurement system.) In this October meeting of the International Committee on Weights and Measures (which was perhaps the seminal event in metrology – the study of accurate measurement) they developed a coherent system of units of measurement. It starts with seven base units, which are: of length (m, the metre); of time (s, the second); of electrical current (A, the ampere); of thermodynamic temperature (K, the kelvin); of light intensity (cd, the candela); of the amount of substance (mol, the mole); and of mass (kg, the kilogram). There are also a range of what are called “derived units” to supplement these, such as the coulomb (electrical charge); the newton (force); the pascal (pressure); the farad (electrical capacitance); and some 15 more (See “1799” and “1875, May”)

• 1961-71: Agent Orange was used in Vietnam by the US military as part of its herbicidal warfare program. It caused major health problems for many individuals who were exposed, and their offspring, plus resulted in enormous environmental damage. It was first used by the British Armed Forces in Malaya during the Malayan Emergency. It was also used by the US military in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War because forests near the border with Vietnam were used by the Viet Cong

• 1961, March: The US Peace Corps established. Its goal  was to assist developing countries  by providing skilled workers in fields such as education, health, entrepreneurship, women’s empowerment, and community development. Volunteers are American citizens, typically with a college degree, who are assigned to specific projects in certain countries based on their qualifications and experience. More than 240,000 have joined and served in 142 countries

• 1961, April: Soviets put first man in space. Travelling in the Vostok 1 capsule, Yuri Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth

• 1961, April: US Bay of Pigs failure in Cuba. A failed landing operation on the coast of Cuba by Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro’s revolution, covertly financed and directed by the US government. The operation took place at the height of the Cold War, and its failure influenced relations between Cuba, the US, and the Soviet Union. The invasion’s defeat solidified Castro’s role as a national hero and widened the political division between the two formerly allied countries. It also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (See “1962, Oct”)

• 1961: Tropic of Cancer published. It was first published in 1934 in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the US. This novel by Henry Miller has been described as “notorious for its candid sexuality” and is responsible for the free speech that we now take for granted in literature. Its publication led to obscenity trials that tested pornography. In 1964, the US Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene 

• 1961, May: First American in space. Alan Shepard flew the first Mercury mission (on a suborbital flight). In 1971, he became the fifth and oldest person to walk on the Moon, age 47

• 1961, May: The start of Amnesty International. A British newspaper The London Observer publishes British lawyer Peter Benenson’s article “The Forgotten Prisoners” on its front page, launching the Appeal for Amnesty 1961 – a campaign calling for the release of all people imprisoned in various parts of the world because of the peaceful expression of their beliefs. Delegates from Belgium, the UK, France, the US, Germany, Ireland and Switzerland met to begin “a permanent international movement in defense of freedom of opinion and religion.” The following year, this movement would officially become the human rights organization Amnesty International

• 1961, Aug: Construction of the Berlin wall begins, to keep residents from leaving, by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) that ideologically and physically divided Berlin and culturally codifying the Cold War. It was portrayed as protecting the Eastern Bloc from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people“ from building a socialist state in East Germany. It came down in 1989 (See “1949, May” and “1989, Nov”)

• 1961, Oct: Soviets exploded Tsar Bomba about 13,000 feet above an island in the Arctic Circle. It was equal to 4000 Hiroshima bombs – the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated

• 1962: Crown prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia issued a decree for the total abolition of slavery. About 1,682 slaves were freed at that time, at a cost to the government of $2,000 each. Faisal briefly became King of Saudi Arabia from November 1964 until his assassination in 1975. The US began to raise the issue of slavery after the meeting between King Abdulaziz and US president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. John F. Kennedy finally persuaded the House of Saud to abolish slavery

• 1962, July: Algeria declared its independence after 142 years of French occupation. This movement toward independence after French promises of greater self-rule went unfulfilled after WWII. In 1954 the National Liberation Front (FLN) began a guerrilla war against France. Their violent urban attacks became known as the Battle of Algiers (1956-57). In 1959 Charles de Gaulle declared that the Algerians had the right to determine their own future

• 1962, July: The US launched a rocket into space to test a fusion bomb, a 1.4 megaton bomb, 500 times as powerful as the one that fell on Hiroshima. Starfish Prime was launched on the tip of a Thor rocket from an island southwest of Hawaii. it created a new artificial radiation belt that was stronger and longer lasting than scientists had predicted. This unexpected “Starfish belt,” which lingered for at least 10 years, destroyed Telstar 1, the first satellite to broadcast a live television signal, and Ariel-1, Britain’s first satellite. It served as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation

• 1962, July: Rwanda gained independence (and separated from Burundi). The Berlin Conference of 1884 assigned the territory to the German Empire, who declared it as part of the German East Africa. Belgium forces invaded Rwanda and Burundi in 1916, during WWI. Rwandans are drawn from just one cultural and linguistic group. However, within this group there are three subgroups: the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. A rift grew between the Hutu and Tutsi populations. In the 1959 Rwandan Revolution, Hutu activists began killing Tutsi and destroying their houses, forcing people to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. In 1961, the pro-Hutu Belgians held a referendum in which the country voted to abolish the monarchy

• 1962, Aug: Nelson Mandela, South Africa, was arrested and imprisoned, and, following the Rivonia Trial, was sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state; he served 27 years in prison 

• 1962, Sept: President John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University made NASA’s fledgling Apollo program a national priority. In doing so, he paved the way for one of humankind’s greatest achievements: stepping onto the lunar surface in 1969. The speech had far-reaching consequences, not only for the space race but for space exploration for decades to come. “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

• 1962, Oct: Cuban Missile Crisis when the USSR put nuclear missiles in Cuba. When the US discovered Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba (a US U-2 spy plane discovered them and one was shot down), President John F. Kennedy demanded their removal and announced a naval blockade of the island. He sent his brother Robert F. Kennedy, who was Attorney General, to meet the Soviet Ambassador to cut a deal. After a thirteen-day standoff between the superpowers, which included a US naval quarantine of Cuba, the Soviet leader Khrushchev agrees to withdraw its missiles. In exchange, the US publicly pledges not to invade Cuba and, confidentially, agrees to pull its nuclear missiles out of Turkey

• 1962, Oct: Nobel Prize awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins for proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. James Watson and Francis Crick actually determined the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. This structure – a long double helix – contains a long row of pairs of four different nitrogen bases, which allow the molecule to function like a code. The publication of the double helix structure of DNA has been described as a turning point in science; understanding of life was fundamentally changed and the modern era of biology began (See “1953, April”) 

• 1962, Dec: Canada’s last execution took place. Two convicted criminals were hung at the Don Jail, Toronto, although it would take until 1976 for Bill C-84 to abolish the death penalty for civil crimes

• 1963, April: Lester Pearson becomes PM of Canada with the Liberals returned to power for the first time in 6 years, defeating the minority Progressive Conservative (Tory) minority government of PM John Diefenbaker. The Liberals would remain in power for 20 of the next 21 years (winning every election except the 1979 election until their landslide defeat in 1984)

• 1963, Aug: Martin Luther King delivers his famous “I have a dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He called for an end to racism in the US, and civil and economic rights for all citizens.It was hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric and would become a defining moment of the civil rights movement. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” (See ”1965, Aug”)

• 1963: A vaccine for measles, one of the most contagious infectious diseases in existence, was made available. Maurice Hilleman, an American microbiologist, developed the first successful vaccine. Of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended in current American vaccine schedules, Hilleman and his team at Merck developed eight: those for measles, mumps, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria. When it was first introduced, about 2.6 million children were dying from the viral infection each year. Tens of millions more were left with severe disabilities. But see end of 2023 for the infections resurgence (See “2023, Dec”)

• 1963, Aug: The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by Russia, UK and the US. The treaty prohibited all test detonations of nuclear weapons except for those conducted underground. It formally went into effect October 1963. Since then, 123 other states have become party to the treaty. Ten states have signed but not ratified the treaty (See “2010, Apr”)

• 1963, Sept: A turning point was marked in the US when a splinter group from the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The explosion killed four girls and injured 22 other people. This marked a turning point in the US during the civil rights movement and contributed to the support for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (See “1964, July”)

• 1963: Betty Friedman writes The Feminine Mystique. Greater equality for women in the world is the broad theme.Friedman was much influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 study The Second Sex, which argued that men fundamentally oppress women. Germaine Greer, in her book The Female Eunuch, also took issue with the “traditional” suburban, consumerist, nuclear family

• 1963, Oct: Profumo sex affair in Britain. John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War in Macmillan’s government, had an extramarital affair with 19-year-old model Christine Keeler. Harold Macmillan resigns as PM because this scandal severely damaged his Conservative government’s credibility. Ultimately, the fallout contributed to the government’s defeat in the 1964 general election

• 1963, Nov: John F. Kennedy assassinated.The 35th president of the US was shot while riding in a  presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas.Many conspiracy theories posit that the assassination involved people or organizations in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man the Warren Commission determined who did it (although he in turn was killed two days later, live on television, by Jack Ruby). Kennedy’s funeral is televised. 96% of all American television sets are on for an average 31 hours out of 72 during this period

• 1963, Nov: Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, became US president upon Kennedy’s death and served until January 1969. His accomplishments were solid regarding domestic policy: his administration passed many major laws that made substantial advancements in civil rights, health care, welfare, and education, but he was strongly criticized for his foreign policy, namely escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War

• 1964, Jan: The black comedy film, Dr. Strangelove, was released. It was directed, co-written, and produced by Stanley Kubrick and starred Peter Sellers. The film, sub-titled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the US. The film is often considered one of the best comedies ever made, as well as one of the greatest films of all time. It was released two years after the Cuban missile crisis, and 31 years before a real-life Strangelove scenario, when Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin came close to pressing the red button after a US meteorological rocket investigating the northern lights off Norway had been interpreted by the Russian military as a hostile gesture. While considered a classic comedy this is actually a terrifying satire 

• 1964, Feb: The first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show of the English rock band the Beatles. The band was seen by a then-record 73 million viewers and came to be regarded as a cultural watershed that launched American Beatlemania – as well as the wider British Invasion of American pop music. After the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, Neilson Ratings estimated that 45% of US television viewers that night saw their appearance. (As well, although Sullivan was wary of Elvis Presley’s image and initially said that he would never book him, Presley became too big a name to ignore, so Sullivan signed him for three appearances starting September 1956.)

• Mid 60s: The British music invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the UKand other aspects of British culture became popular and significant to the rising “counterculture” on both sides of the Atlantic. This included pop and rock groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones

• 1964, March: A Brazilian coup d’état led to the overthrow of the president by members of the Brazilian Armed Forces. The coup brought to Brazil a military regime/dictatorship (1964-1985) politically aligned to the interests of the US. The coup was part of the Cold War in Latin America and occurred at the same time as several other military coups in the region (See “1985, April”)

• 1964, April: Nelson Mandela made his “I Am Prepared to Die” speech pointing out the injustices of South African society when 10 African National Congress leaders were put on trial accused of sabotage and furthering communism. Instead of testifying as a witness he chose to make a speech pointing out the injustices of South African society. The three-hour speech is considered one of the great speeches of the 20th century, and a rallying cry for racial justice and democratic ideals. (“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, my lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”) Mandela, however, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He served 27 years of the sentence, and four years after his release in 1990, he was elected the first Black president of South Africa (See “1990, May”)

• 1964, June: The Group of 77 (G-77) was established by 77 developing countries. It is the largest intergovernmental organization of developing countries in the UN, which provides the means for the countries of the South to articulate and promote their collective economic interests. The G-77 has offices around the world and meets annually at the UN in New York

• 1964, June: The Declaration of Helsinki is a set of ethical principles regarding human experimentation. It states, among other things, that every clinical trial must be registered in a publicly accessible database. It was developed originally for the medical community by the World Medical Association (WMA) and is widely regarded as the cornerstone document on human research ethics. It is morally binding on physicians, and that obligation overrides any national or local laws or regulations. It has since undergone seven revisions (the most recent at the General Assembly in October 2013). The Declaration is an important document in the history of research ethics as it is the first significant effort of the medical community to regulate research itself, and forms the basis of most subsequent documents

• 1964, July: US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin (See “1965, March and “1965, Aug”)

• 1964, Aug: The Gulf of Tonkin incident escalated the US military involvement in Vietnam. Two unprovoked attacks took place by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam. The outcome was the passage by the US Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted US President Lyndon Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by “communist aggression”. The resolution served as Johnson’s legal justification for deploying US conventional forces to South Vietnam and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam. This greatly escalated the US military involvement. (Note: US involvement had already increased under President John F. Kennedy, from just under a thousand military advisors in 1959 to 23,000 by 1964.) (See “1955, Nov-1975, Apr”, “1973, Jan”, and “1975, April”)

• 1964, Sept: The Colombia River Treaty was ratified by Canada and the US (it was signed in 1961). The main benefits were to optimize hydroelectricity production and coordination of flood control (a major flood in 1948 got the two countries thinking). The Columbia is not like other rivers. For one, it crosses the US border to empty into the Pacific in Oregon. The Columbia River basin is a vital source of electricity, providing about 40% of all US hydroelectric power, while B.C. draws almost half of its total electrical generation from the region. A revamp of the treaty is being developed for 2024 that provides greater flexibility over water flows in Canada and adding considerations around the river ecosystem “as a third leg of the stool of the treaty that is based on power generation and flood control”

• 1964, Oct: Russia’s Voskhod 1 launched with 3 astronauts – a record

• 1964, Oct: The Russian Politburo removed Khrushchev and put in Leonid Brezhnev on the same day as the Voskhod 1 launch. He became first Secretary of the CPSU, the most powerful position in the USSR. Russia’s “stagnation” period started although it achieved nuclear parity with the US. While Brezhnev came up through the military, some historians saw  him as “peace loving”. He was succeeded in 1982 by Yuri Andropov, who was a strict head of the KGB (who in turn died in 1984) (See “1982, Nov”)

• 1964, Oct: Shinkansen, Japan’s high-speed rail line (the “Bullet Train”), took its inaugural trip, less than two weeks before the Tokyo Olympic Games started. The line, which travelled at around 130 mph, cut the travel time from Tokyo to Osaka by around half (to 3 hours, 10 minutes). Most Shinkansen trains today operate at ~186 mph, but some run up to 200 

• 1965, Jan: The Canada-US Auto Pact (officially The Automotive Products Trade Agreement of 1965) led to the integration of the Canadian and US auto industries in a shared North American market. While it brought great benefits to Canada, it was eventually found to be contrary to international trade rules and was cancelled in 2001. By then it had accomplished its biggest goal – an integrated North American industry with a much stronger Canadian presence (See “1878, March”)

• 1965, Feb: The Canadian flag (Maple Leaf) became the official flag of Canada, replacing the Red Ensign. It consists of a red field with a white square at its centre in the ratio of 1∶2∶1, in which is featured a stylized, red, 11-pointed maple leaf charged in the centre. In 1964, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson formed a committee to resolve the ongoing issue of the lack of an official Canadian flag, sparking a serious debate about a flag change to replace the Union Flag. Out of three choices, the maple leaf design by George Stanley, based on the flag of the Royal Military College of Canada, was selected

• 1965, Feb: Assassination of Malcolm X. A controversial figure accused of preaching racism and violence, Malcolm X is also a widely celebrated individual within African-American and Muslim American communities for his pursuit of racial justice

• 1965, March: First space walk. Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, exited the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for 12 minutes

• 1965, March: Arrival of the first American combat troops in Vietnam. 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived in Da Nang to protect the US airbase there from Viet Cong attacks. (Canada’s PM Lester Pearson warned US president Lyndon Johnson in a speech in Philadelphia against escalating that conflict. Rather than listening, LBJ lashed out at him.)

• , March: Three protest marches took place along the highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The events resulted in the murder of a civil rights activist and many vicious acts by the police. The events in Selma, Alabama galvanized public opinion and mobilized Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act five months later. Ironically, ABC interrupted the network’s broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg” – the movie that explored Nazi bigotry, war crimes and the moral culpability of those who followed orders and didn’t speak out against the Holocaust – to air the disturbing, newly arrived footage of the march (showing state troopers using tear gas and clubs to break up a legitimate march). Nearly 50 million Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited TV premiere couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of the rampaging state troopers. The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes (See “1964, July”, “1965, March” and “1965, Aug”)

• 1965, July: The US Congress created Medicare and Medicaid as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program. The Medicine Act established Medicare, an health insurance program for the elderly, and Medicaid, a health insurance program for people with limited income. These basic insurance programs were started for Americans who didn’t have health insurance, but they’ve changed over the years to provide more and more Americans with access

• 1965, Aug: The US Voting Rights Act became law, spurred on by the recent events in Selma, Alabama. It was an “act to enforce the 15th amendment to the constitution”. The Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. This was a landmark piece of federal legislation in the US that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lynden Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement (See”1964, July” and “1965, March”)

• 1965, Aug: The Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles. Aseries of violent confrontations between Los Angeles police and residents of Watts and other predominantly African American neighbourhoods of South-Central Los Angeles. The riots resulted in the deaths of 34 people, while more than 1,000 were injured and more than $40 million worth of property was destroyed. Conflicting interpretations of the cause emerged, from wanton lawlessness of minority men who had criminal records, to insurrection fostered by urban gangs or by the Black Muslim movement, which the mainstream press then regarded as a radical cult, to the long-standing poor police-community relations in South-Central Los Angeles, to the riots as a protest against the poverty and hopelessness of life in the inner city

• 1965, Aug: The Second India-Pakistan War. The Pakistani Army unsuccessfully attempted to take Kashmir by force. The attempt to seize the state was unsuccessful so the war reached a stalemate. Background: when the British colony of India gained its independence in 1947, it was partitioned into two separate entities: the secular nation of India and the predominantly Muslim nation of Pakistan. Pakistan was composed of two not connected regions, East Pakistan and West Pakistan, separated by Indian territory. The state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had a predominantly Muslim population but a Hindu leader, shared borders with both India and West Pakistan. The argument over which nation would incorporate the state led to the first India-Pakistan War in 1947-48 and ended with UN mediation. Jammu and Kashmir, also known as “Indian Kashmir” or just “Kashmir,” joined the Republic of India, but the Pakistani Government continued to believe that the majority Muslim state rightfully belonged to Pakistan. The UN Security Council in September called for an end to the fighting and negotiations on the settlement of the Kashmir problem, and the US and the UK supported the UN decision by cutting off arms supplies to both belligerents. See “The Tashkent Agreement” in 1966 for resolution (See “1954, May” and “2022, April”)

• 1965, Aug: Singapore separates from Malaysia and becomes a sovereign independent nation. Singapore was founded in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles. In 1963 Malaysia was formed by the merger of the Federation of Malaya with the former British colonies of North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore. In August 1965 major race riots occurred in Singapore and thus Malaysia expelled Singapore from the 14 states of the Malaysian federation

• 1965: Southern Rhodesia renamed itself Rhodesia and broke from the United Kingdom with the express purpose of maintaining white rule. It was an unrecognized state in Southern Africa from 1965 to 1979, equivalent in territory to modern Zimbabwe. The new government was led by Ian Smith, who declared that “the white man is master of Rhodesia. He has built it, and he intends to keep it.” (Southern Rhodesia was established in 1923 as a British colony named for Cecil Rhodes, who made his fortune in consolidating diamond mines. By the 1960s, as much of Africa rapidly decolonized around it, the colonial government faced pressure from London to hold free elections and accede to majority rule.) The state endured international isolation and a 15-year guerrilla war; this culminated in a peace agreement that established sovereignty as Zimbabwe in 1980. Zimbabwe then joined the Commonwealth of Nations, from which it was suspended in 2002 for breaches of international law by its government under Robert Mugabe. Mugabe became Prime Minister in 1980, when his ZANU-PF party won the general election following the end of white minority rule; he was the President of Zimbabwe from 1987 until his resignation in 2017. Under Mugabe’s authoritarian regime, the state security apparatus dominated the country and was responsible for widespread human rights violations (It doesn’t get any better – see “2017, Nov” and “2023, Aug”)

• 1965: The Olivetti Programma 101 calculator introduced; it wasone of the first “all in one” commercial desktop programmable calculators. It had a removable magnetic card to store programmed calculation, a revolutionary item for that time

• 1965: Moore’s Law postulated that the number of transistors that can be packed into a given unit of space will double about every two years. This was predicted by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel (INTC). Experts agree that computers should reach the physical limits of Moore’s Law at some point in the 2020s. The high temperatures of transistors eventually would make it impossible to create smaller circuits 

• 1965: The first wide-area computer network ever built was connected. Thomas Merrill and Lawrence G. Roberts connect the TX-2 computer in Massachusetts to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone line 

• 1965, Oct: Indonesian Communist Purge by the army became one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. Large-scale killings occurred primarily targeting members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) as well as ethnic Chinese, atheists and alleged leftists. Between 500,000 to 1,000,000 people were killed during the main period of violence from October 1965 to March 1966. The atrocities were instigated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Declassified documents demonstrate the Indonesian authorities received support from foreign countries such as the US and the UK. The upheavals led to the fall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto’s three-decade authoritarian presidency. A top-secret CIA report from 1968 stated that the massacres “rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during WWII, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.”

• 1965, Dec: The UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). It entered into force in January 1969. As of July 2020, it has 88 signatories and 182 parties. The Convention commits its members to the elimination of racial discrimination and the promotion of understanding among all races. The Convention also requires its parties to criminalize hate speech and criminalize membership in racist organizations. In 2017 Canadians were commended for taking in thousands of Syrian refugees, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, and the House of Commons condemning Islamophobia after a white nationalist shot six men to death at a Quebec City mosque

• 1966, Jan: The Tashkent Agreement between India and Pakistan was signed in the Soviet city of Tashkent by the Prime Minister of India and the President of Pakistan to end the second Indo‐Pakistan War over Kashmir. Both countries agreed not only to withdraw their troops from each other’s territory and repatriate their prisoners of war, but also to start normalizing their diplomatic relationship. The agreement did little to mollify the deep hostility (See ”2022, April”)

• 1966, Jan: A military dictatorship in Nigeria began with a coup d’état; democratic rule only returned in 1999. The overthrow was planned and executed by a group of revolutionary Nigerian nationalist officers. A period followed when members of the Nigerian Armed Forces held power through to 1999 (with an interregnum from 1979 to 1983 when the Second Nigerian Republic was formed). The 1999 presidential elections established the Fourth Nigerian Republic and the return of Nigeria to democratic rule. It is currently (2023) Africa’s largest democracy and is forecast to become the world’s third most populous country by 2050 with a median age under 23 (See “1960, Oct”)

• 1966 Feb: The Soviet Luna 9 was the first soft landing on moon, plus they sent pictures; it became the first spacecraft to achieve a survivable landing on a celestial body. The mission also determined that a spacecraft would not sink into the lunar dust; that the ground could support a lander. In April Luna 10 was the 1st artificial lunar satellite around moon

• 1966-1976: The Cultural Revolution was launched in China by Mao(his political comeback and undaunted by the failures of the Great Leap Forward). Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society and to re-impose Maoism as the dominant ideology in the CPC. The government at different levels controlled the production of everything, often with no planning, as long as it was in accordance with “revolutionary principles”. Approximately 16 million educated youth (10% of China’s urban population) were sent to the countryside, particularly the remote border areas and poor regions. Millions were persecuted and killed 

• 1966, March: The Canadian “Munsinger” affair was Canada’s first national political sex scandal. The affair involved Gerda Munsinger, a German citizen who had been convicted in Germany as a prostitute, a petty thief and a smuggler. She emigrated to Canada and in 1960 was the mistress of the former Associate Minister of National Defence Pierre Sévigny. Munsinger was actually “a self-admitted espionage agent” in the employ of the “Russian intelligence service”

• 1966 March: The American Gemini 8 first space docking. Then 10 successful missions to moon took place with the Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter probes (in 15 months)

• 1967, Jan: Three US astronauts died in Apollo I and this space mission never flew. A cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test at Cape Kennedy killed all three crew members(Grissom, White, Chaffee)

• 1967, Jan: The first Super Bowl football game of the US National Football League (NFL) was played with the Green Bay Packers defeating the Kansas City Chiefs. 57 of them have since been held and they are typically the most watched American TV broadcast of the year. The halftime show has also been a key part of the experience. On average over 100 million people alone from the US watch it. A 30-second commercial continues to climb in cost (See “2024, Feb”)

• 1967, April:  Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as an officially registered competitor. The rule book for the Boston Marathon made no mention of gender. Switzer wore a hooded sweatshirt, but a few miles into the course, the hood slipped off and it became clear that a woman was running the Boston Marathon as an official entrant. During her run, the race manager assaulted Switzer, trying to grab her bib number and thereby remove her from official competition. As a result of her run, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) banned women from competing in races against men. It was not until 1972 that the Boston Marathon established an official women’s race. (Note: In 1966, a female runner, Bobby Gibb, had tried to enter the race officially but had been rejected by the BAA Director who claimed women were physiologically incapable of running 26 miles. Gibb completed the 1966 race ahead of two-thirds of the runners.) 

• 1967 April: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died on re-entry to earth in a shoddily constructed space capsule Soyuz I, when the parachutes didn’t deploy. Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, had decided to stage a spectacular mid-space rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships to celebrate Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution

• 1967, April: The Greek government was overthrown by a coup d’état by a group of far-right colonels, led by Colonel George Papadopoulos. They suspended many liberties and forced the king to flee the country. The citizens’ right of assembly was revoked and no political demonstrations were allowed. (Personal aside: Ann and I were in Greece at the time; all travel was suspended for two days and young uniformed men with rifles were everywhere.)

• 1967, May: Egyptian troops occupied Sharm el-Sheikh, a port on the Red Sea, and announced that the Straits of Tiran were henceforth closed to Israeli shipping. The straits offered Israel the only access to the Port of Eilat and were the main route for its oil imports. The blockade was a milestone on the road to the Six-Day War weeks later

• 1967, June: The Six-Day War in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli War). As Egypt began to ready itself for war, Israel launched a preemptive strike; it seized the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt (the only territory they returned), the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel still holds the land it captured (See “1948, May” and “2023, Oct”)

• 1967, June: Egypt shut down the Suez Canal following the Six Day War and Israel’s occupation of the Sinai peninsula. For the next eight years, the Suez Canal, which separates the Sinai from the rest of Egypt, existed as the front line between the Egyptian and Israeli armies. In 1975, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat reopened the Suez Canal as a gesture of peace after talks with Israel 

• 1967: The island of Perim in the strait called Bab-el-Mandeb (Gate of Tears) became part of the People’s Republic of South Yemen. It is a strait between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. It connects the Sea to the Gulf of Aden. (The government of Britain asserted its ownership in 1857 and erected a lighthouse there in 1861, using it to command the Red Sea and the trade routes through the Suez Canal. The strait acts as a strategic link between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.) About 8% of the world’s oil passes through the strait per day. It is considered one of the shipping “choke-points” around the world. (The others are the Panama Canal, Suez Canal, Turkish Straits, Strait of Gibraltar, and Malacca Straits) (See “2023, Dec”)

• 1967, June: Chinese explode hydrogen bomb.With successful testing of this three-stage thermonuclear device, China became the fifth country to have successfully developed a thermonuclear weapon after the US, the UK, the Soviet Union and France (See “1960, Feb”)

• 1967, June: The US Supreme Court ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage.In the Loving v Loving case, in a unanimous decision, the court ruled that state laws barring interracial marriage are unconstitutional. Its decision struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law

• 1967, Summer: The “summer of love” in the US was a time when hippies flocked to America’s west coat to protest war, take drugs, and peace out. But it was also a time when more than 150 race riots struck everywhere, from Atlanta to Boston amid brutal temperatures, earning the period another name: “the long, hot summer”

• 1967, July: TheDetroit Rebellion, was the bloodiest of the urban riots in the US during the “Long hot summer of 1967”. A core issue was unspoken agreements among whites which kept black people out of certain neighbourhoods and prevented them from buying their own homes. Composed mainly of confrontations between black residents and the Detroit Police department, it exploded into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in American history, lasting five days and surpassing the scale of Detroit’s 1943 race riot. It even had a song written about it by Gordon Lightfoot: “Black Day In July” (which was subsequently banned by radio stations in 30 American states)

• 1967, Aug: The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was established. Founding members: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand then added Brunei (1984), Vietnam (1995), Laos (1997), Myanmar (Burma) and Cambodia (in 1999), and observer/seeking membership states Timor-Leste and Papua New Guinea. These ten member states have a population of over 600 million, a gross domestic product of 6.5% of global GDP, and represent 8.5% of the world population. They promote economic and security cooperation. The creation of ASEAN was initially motivated by the desire to contain communism (with the Soviet Union occupation of the northern Korean Peninsula after WWII, etc.) (See “2023, Sept”)

• 1967: The first large-scale oil sands mine and bitumen upgrader started up in Canada bythe Great Canadian Oil Sands, formed by Sunoco in 1952. Now known as Suncor Energy, its Base Plant operations would undergo several phases of expansion over the next 50 years. The Syncrude consortium, headed by Imperial Oil, was established in 1964. (In 1929, Bitumount became Alberta’s first privately-funded commercial oil sands plant. The facility produced several thousand barrels of asphalt annually in the 1930s. Due to financial problems, the project was taken over by the Alberta government in 1948.)

• 1967: The theory of a self-regulating Earth published. Dr. James Lovelock, a British ecologist, published his theory, which has been central to the causes and consequences of global warming. He theorized that something must be regulating heat, oxygen, nitrogen and other components, and that the Earth functioned as a “living organism” that is able to “regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state” (known as the “Gaia theory”). (Also, in his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfil the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions.)

• 1967: Sir Godfrey Hounsfield invented the first CT scanner at EMI Central Research Laboratories using x-ray technology. The technology creates cross-sectional slices of the body. In 1971 the first patient brain CT (computerized tomography) was performed in Wimbledon, England

• 1967, Oct: The Outer Space Treaty came into effect, banning ownership of the region beyond the earth and its atmosphere. It also bans the weaponization of space. There are now 114 countries that are parties to the treaty – including all major spacefaring countries and 22 others are signatories

• 1967, Nov: Yeman independence. Hastened by a bloody insurgency, Britain withdraws from South Yemen (North Yemen had been autonomous since 1918). North and South unification occurred May 1990 (See “1967” and “2022, Dec”)

• 1968: Completion of the project to salvage the two temples at Abu Simbel, Egypt from the rising waters of the Nile River caused by erection of the Aswan High Dam. They were built by the Egyptian king Ramses II during his reign from 1279 to 1213 BC. The temple itself was dedicated to the sun gods Amon-Re and Re-Horakhte. Between 1963 and 1968 an international team of engineers and scientists, supported by funds from more than 50 countries, dug away the top of the cliff and completely disassembled both temples, reconstructing them on high ground more than 60 metres above their previous site. In all, some 16,000 blocks were moved (See “1970, July”)

• 1968, Jan: North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnamese and US targets (See “1955, Nov-1975, Apr” and “1975, April”)

• 1968, March: The Mỹ Lai massacre by US troops, Vietnam. This was the mass murder of ~500 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by US troops in South Vietnam. This war crime, which was later called “the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War”, is the largest publicized massacre of civilians by US forces in the 20th century 

• 1968, Spring: Probably the heaviest single bombing in the history of warfare took place in response to a siege by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) of the US Marine base at Khe Sanh in western Quang Tri, Cambodia. American B-52s pulverized five square miles around the base. They dropped 100,000 tons of bombs. These giant planes, each carrying up to 108 bombs totalling 60,000 pounds, would attack in large groups that destroyed everything in a “box” over a mile long and a half mile wide. Quang Tri province was basically bombed flat during the war, with most of its capital and infrastructure destroyed: only 11 of 3,500 Quang Tri villages were left unbombed by the end of the war. The US, and its national security advisor Henry Kissinger, were accused by many of breaking international law by authorizing the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70, an undeclared war on an ostensibly neutral nation

• 1968, April: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, an African-American clergyman and civil rights leader. James Earl Ray, an American fugitive, was convicted and sentenced to 99 years of imprisonment where he died

• 1968, April: The rock musical “Hair” opened on Broadway. It featured anti-Vietnam War issues, nudity, profanity, depiction of the use of illegal drugs, and an irreverence for the American flag. It had a racially integrated cast 

• 1968, June: Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He was the US Attorney General 1961-64 and one of the youngest cabinet members in American history. A candidate in the 1968 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he advocated for the civil rights movement and the fight against organized crime. He was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, who held strong anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian beliefs. His death sentence was commuted to life; he still remains in prison. Kennedy’s assassination prompted the Secret Service to protect presidential candidates

• 1968, June: Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada, after just winning the Liberal leadership race. Liberal PM Lester Pearson had resigned as party leader as a result of declining health and failing to win a majority government in two attempts. While a relative unknown, Trudeau’s charisma (plus he was intellectual, single, and fully bilingual) appealed to Canadian voters and his popularity became known as “Trudeaumania”. Trudeau beat out the Progressive Conservative Party led by Robert Stanfield and the New Democratic Party (that was founded in 1960) led by Tommy Douglas (former long-time Premier of Saskatchewan). Trudeau was arguably Canada’s best-known politician, both at home and abroad. He introduced legal reforms to make Canada a more “just society” and made Canada officially bilingual with the Official Languages Act of 1969 (liberating Canada from its unicultural trappings). He negotiated Canada’s constitutional independence from Britain and established a new Canadian Constitution with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms (lessening Canada’s dependence on Great Britain and its authority but without Quebec’s signature). He played an important role in defeating the Quebec separatist movement of the 1970s and 1980s; although his decision to invoke the War Measures Act in response to the 1970 October Crisis drew sharp criticism. His federalist stance as well as his language and economic policies alienated many in Canada, particularly in the West (witness the National Energy Program) (See “1970, Oct”

• 1968, July: Amnesty International founded. It is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the UK. It has more than ten million members and supporters around the world. Its original focus was prisoners of conscience; that widened to include miscarriages of justice and torture. In 1977, it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 

• 1968, July: The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons signed (NPT). It is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament. The treaty entered into force in 1970. As required after 25 years NPT Parties met in May 1995 and agreed to extend the treaty indefinitely. More countries are parties to the NPT than any other arms limitation and disarmament agreement, a testament to the treaty’s significance.  As of August 2016, 191 states have become parties to the treaty, though North Korea announced its withdrawal in 2003, following detonation of nuclear devices in violation of core obligations. Four UN member states have never accepted the NPT, three of which possess nuclear weapons: India, Israel, and Pakistan. Note: the movement of some tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus in June 2023 is in contravention of this treaty (See “2017, July”)

• 1968, Aug: Leonid Brezhnev sent Soviet tanks into Prague, Czechoslovakia to end the “Prague Spring ” reform movement for national freedom. The invasion (which was actually by the combined four Warsaw Pact countries: the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, and the Hungarian People’s Republic) stopped the liberalization reforms and strengthened the authoritarian wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Brezhnev had replaced Khrushchev in 1964 as First Secretary of the CPSU, the most powerful position in the USSR. While Brezhnev came up through the military, some historians saw Brezhnev as “peace loving”; he was succeeded by Yuri Andropov (who died in 1984) (See “1989, Nov”)

• 1968, Aug: Democratic party’s Chicago headquarters violence. Indiscriminate police violence against counter-culture protesters, reporters, and bystanders took place in front of the Democratic party’s convention headquarters in Chicago. TV networks broadcast live the anti-war protesters chanting the now-iconic “The whole world is watching”

• 1968, Sept: An influenza A (H3N2) virus pandemic started in the US. Deaths worldwide amounted to one million with 100,000 in the US

• 1968, Oct: The 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico was remembered for the civil-rights protest – and a remarkable long jump. Two African American medalists in the 200-metre race raised their fists in solidarity with the Black Power movement while standing on the winner’s podium as the Star-Spangled Banner played. Both athletes were banned from the Olympic Village and sent home. This Olympics was also known for the remarkable world record gold winning long jump by US athlete Bob Beamon. By jumping 8.90 m (29 ft 2 1/4in) he broke the existing record by a margin of 55 cm (21 3/4 in). The jump is still the Olympic record and the second-longest wind legal jump in history. A sports journalist wrote a book about the leap, The Perfect Jump

• 1968, Oct: Apollo 7 eleven day mission around earth by Walter Schirra plus two others. It was the first crewed flight in NASA’s Apollo program (and the first live TV broadcast from an American spacecraft), and saw the resumption of human spaceflight by the agency after the fire that killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts during a launch rehearsal test January 1967 

• 1968, Nov: Republican Richard Nixon became US president (through to 1974, after L.B.Johnston, when he resigned)

• 1968, Dec: First men to fly around Moon. Americans Mission Commander Frank Borman plus Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon ten times over the course of twenty hours without landing, during which they made a Christmas Eve TV broadcast

• 1968: A book, The Population Bomb, argued that plummeting death rates had created an untenable situation of too many people who could not be fed or housed.It was written by Paul Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford University. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote. “In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now.” Ehrlich’s prophecy proved wrong. The green revolution, a series of innovations in agriculture that began in the early twentieth century, accelerated such that crop yields expanded to meet humankind’s needs. Moreover, governments around the world managed to remediate the worst effects of pollution and environmental degradation, at least in terms of daily living standards in multiple megacities

• Late 1960s-1998: The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years. A key issue was the status of Northern Ireland. Unionists and loyalists, who for historical reasons were mostly Ulster Protestants, wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists and republicans, who were mostly Irish Catholics, wanted Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and join a united Ireland 

• 1969, Feb: The first wide-body jetliner, the Boeing 747, flew. It was the first airplane dubbed “Jumbo Jet”. It was transformational, introducing flying for the middle class. The 747-400 was introduced in 1989 with new engines and lighter materials making it a great fit for the growing demand for trans-Pacific flights

• 1969, March: China and the Soviet Union had a military clash on Zhenbao Island, northeastern China. (This finally got resolved in the 1990s!) This along with other incidents reflected the significant tensions that had been occurring following China’s ideological split with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. It is well documented that the Soviet Union had considered a preemptive surgical strike against China’s nuclear bases and certain border cities. The US had been asked to stay neutral but the Nixon administration refused and leaked the information to the press forcing the Soviets to abandon the plan

• 1969, June: The Stonewall riots were a series of protests by members of the LGBTQ community in response to a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, NYC. The police became violent and the patrons of the local lesbian and gay bars and trans activists fought back. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the fight of LGBT rights in the US (See “

• 1969, July: First man to walk on moon. Apollo 11 was launched to the moon with Edwin Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong, with Neil the first to walk on it, July 20. He spoke those now famous words to a live, worldwide TV audience, “That’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.”

• 1969, Aug: The Woodstock Rock Festival was held, and became one of the largest music festivals in history, attracting more than 400,000 attendees. Woodstock became synonymous with the counter-culture of the 1960s. The four-day festival was held on a dairy farm SW of the town of Woodstock, New York. 34 acts were on the bill, including Santana, Credence Clearwater Revival (CCR), Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, Sly and the Family Stone, Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, the Who, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Sha Na Na

• 1969, Aug: The brutal murders of movie actress Sharon Tate by the Manson Family, a doomsday cult. Tate was 8¹⁄₂ months pregnant and the wife of film director Roman Polanski. They also killed Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune plus two others and then the next night they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. The cult was led by Charles Manson who had become fixated on the idea of an imminent apocalyptic race war between America’s Black population and the larger White population. The words “Healter [sic] Skelter” had been painted in victims’ blood on the LaBiancas’ fridge, but the reference’s significance did not come to light until the murder trial. In Manson’s mind, benign Beatles’ songs like “Blackbird,” “Piggies” and, most prominently, “Helter Skelter,” foretold a bloody, apocalyptic race war

• 1969, Aug: The American built oil tanker SS Manhattan became the first commercial ship to cross the Northwest Passage. She was escorted by the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker CCGS John A. Macdonald. This route through the Northwest Passage was quite controversial in international relations as sovereignty of these waters is claimed by Canada and this claim has been disputed by the US. Canada has defined all waters in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago as being “Canadian Internal Waters”. At one point during the voyage, Inuit hunters stopped the vessel and demanded that the vessel master ask permission to cross through Canadian territory, which he did, and they granted 

• 1969, Sept: America’s first automatic teller machine (ATM) dispensed cash at the Chemical Bank, New York (Rockville). It only dispensed cash. There are now over one million in the world 

• 1969, Oct: The Monte Python’s Flying Circus sketch comedy series commenced, with 45 episodes airing over four series from 1969 to 1974. This British surreal comedy series was created by and starred Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam. The series stands out for its use of absurd situations, mixed with risqué and innuendo-laden humour, sight gags and observational sketches without punchlines. Much of the humour targets the idiosyncrasies of British life, especially that of professionals, as well as aspects of politics. Their comedy is often pointedly intellectual. The Pythons’ influence on comedy has been compared to the Beatles’ influence on music

• 1969, Nov: The US Apollo 12 was the second successful human landing on the moon. They were on the moon for 31 1/2 hours and covered 1.35 kms on foot

• 1969, Dec: Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway, California where the Hells Angels were hired to act as security in exchange for $500 in beer and front-row seats (they also stabbed a fan to death). The event is remembered for considerable violence. Rolling Stone magazine termed it ”rock and roll’s all-time worst day”

• 1969, Dec: Seiko produced the world’s first commercial quartz wristwatch, the Seiko-Quartz Astro, seriously affecting the Swiss watch industry. Defined as one of the twentieth-century world’s great inventions. Quartz is a crystal that will oscillate dramatically and do so by an exactly known number of vibrations a second and has been used in timekeeping since the discovery of the phenomenon, although Seiko had to figure out how to control it. The 1969 quartz revolution nearly brought the Swiss watch industry to its knees. The watch also brought the divide into focus in Japan between, on the one hand, their perceived modern need for the perfect and, on the other, a lingering fondness for the imperfect. (The Japanese even have a term for the liking for the natural and the ragged and the undermachined: wabi-sari.) 

• 1970, April: After an accident, the US Apollo 13 never landed on the moon. It was commanded by Jim Lovell. An oxygen tank exploded and the crew had to transfer to the lunar module as a lifeboat. It was only designed to support two men on the lunar surface for two days. New procedures were improvised so it could support three men for four days

• 1970, July: The Aswan High Dam in Egypt was completed. It is one of the world’s largest embankment dams, and was built across the Nile in Aswan, Egypt between 1960 and 1970. Construction of the High Dam became a key objective of the government following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952; with its ability to better control flooding, provide increased water storage for irrigation and generate hydroelectricity, the dam was seen as pivotal to Egypt’s planned industrialization. The US decided to withdraw its offer of funding for the dam. The Soviets offered Nasser $1.12 billion at 2% interest for its construction (See “1968”)

• 1970, Oct: Canada’s October crisis – when members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped two high profile people. The FLQ aimed to establish an independent and socialist Quebec through violent means. PM Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act of 1914 for the first time. (A reform of the act was passed in 1988.) The crisis began with the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross. In the subsequent negotiations, Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte was kidnapped and murdered by a cell of the FLQ. Public outcry and a federal crackdown subsequently ended the crisis and resulted in a drastic loss of support for the FLQ, with a small number of members being granted refuge in Cuba. (The War Measures Act was repealed in 1988. It was replaced by the Emergencies Act. This Act created more limited and specific powers to deal with security emergencies. Under the Act, Cabinet orders must be reviewed by Parliament. They must be in accordance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights.) (See “1968, June” and “1980, Oct”)

• 1970, Dec: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began operation to protect human health and the environment. The EPA was initially charged with the administration of the Clean Air Act (1970); the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act (1972); and the Clean Water Act (1972). One of the EPA’s early successes was an agreement with automobile manufacturers to install catalytic converters in cars, thereby reducing emissions of unburned hydrocarbons by 85%. The EPA’s enforcement was in large part responsible for a decline of one-third to one-half in most air pollution emissions in the US from 1970 to 1990

• 1971, Jan: The first pocket-sized electronic calculator to use LED Display was the Busicom LE-120A, known as the HANDY. It was the first handheld calculator to use a “calculator on a chip” integrated circuit. The calculator featured a 12-digit display in red LED and cost $395 when it first went on sale. (The flip side of calculators vs a slide rule is the position some take in that people who use them have no number sense.)  (See “1614” and 1622”)

• 1971: The Nordic Council of Ministers was established.  Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are members. Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Åland now enjoy the same representation. Their vision is that the “Nordic region will become the most sustainable and integrated region in the world in 2030”

• 1971, March: The Bangladesh War of Independence included the largest genocide since the Holocaust. This revolution and armed conflict was sparked by the rise of the Bengali nationalist and self-determination movement in East Pakistan which resulted in the independence of Bangladesh. During the war members of the Pakistani military and supporting pro-Pakistani Islamist militias called the Razakars, raped between 200 and 400,000 Bangladeshi women and girls in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. It is estimated that members of the Pakistani military and supporting pro-Pakistani Islamist militias killed between 300,000 and thee million civilians in Bangladesh. (Note: the Government of Bangladesh states three million people were killed during the genocide, making it the largest genocide since the Holocaust.)

• 1971, April: Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a multiculturalism policy. It was adopted by the Liberal party under PM Pierre Trudeau. An unexpected by-product of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-69), multiculturalism was intended as a policy solution to manage both rising Francophone nationalism, particularly in Quebec, and increasing cultural diversity across Canada. The neologism “multiculturalism” is one of Canada’s gifts to the world, and since 1971, central to our identity (See “1968, June”)

• 1971, May: The national passenger railroad company of the United States was founded (Amtrac). It operates inter-city rail service in 46 of the 48 contiguous US states and three Canadian provinces. Founded in 1971 as a quasi-public corporation to operate many US passenger rail routes, Amtrak receives a combination of state and federal subsidies but is managed as a for-profit organization

• 1971, June: The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers that were an history of the US’ political and military involvement in Vietnam. They were leaked by Daniel Ellsbergandprovided evidence of US lies re Vietnam war. They revealed that, early on, the government had knowledge that the war as then resourced could most likely not be won. Further, as an editor of The New York Times was to write much later, these documents “demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”

• 1971, Sept:Greenpeace was founded – in Canada. It is known for its direct actions and has been described as one of the most visible environmental organizations in the world. Their first initiative was to charter a ship, which they renamed Greenpeace, and sailed towards where the US was planning an underground nuclear weapon test in the tectonically unstable island of Amchitka in Alaska. From this initiative they now have a presence in 55 countries 

• 1971, Oct: The first computed tomography image – a CT scan – of the human brain was made. Doctors scanned their first patient: a middle-aged woman who showed signs of a brain tumour. A new generation CT scanner was developed in 2008 that could take images of beating hearts or coronary arteries in less than one second

• 1971, Oct: The song “American Pie” by American singer and songwriter Don McLean was released. The song also held the record for almost 50 years for being the longest song to reach number one (before Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” – 10 minute version) broke the record in 2021. “American Pie” has been described as “one of the most successful and debated songs of the 20th century”. The repeated phrase “the day the music died” refers to the plane crash in 1959 that killed early rock and roll stars Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. The meaning of the other lyrics, which cryptically allude to many of the jarring events and social changes experienced during the decade that followed, has been debated for decade. For example, some commentators have identified the song as outlining the darkening of cultural mood, as over time the cultural vanguard passed from Pete Seeger and Joan Baez (the “King and Queen” of folk music), then from Elvis Presley (known as “the King” of Rock and Roll), to Bob Dylan (“the Jester”) – who wore a jacket similar to that worn by cultural icon James Dean, was known as “the voice of his generation” (“a voice that came from you and me”) (See “1959, Feb”)

• 1971, Nov: Intel Corporation introduced the first-ever commercially available microprocessor (a computer on a chip), the Intel 4004 within three years of its incorporation in July 1968 by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. The 4004 chip was initially created for a Japanese calculator-making company. This founded Intel’s decade-long prominence in microchip design that led to the first personal computers and portable electronics ranging from mobile phones to laptops, tablets and smart phones

• Re chip sizes: The 4004 microprocessor, the size of a little fingernail, delivered the same computing power as the first electronic computer built in 1946, which filled an entire room. But they continue to diminish in size, now to inconceivable numbers. In the Broadwell family of chips created in 2016, the node size was down to fourteen-billionths of a metre (the size of the smallest of viruses) and each wafer contained no fewer than seven billion transistors. The Skylake chips made by Intel have transistors that are sixty times smaller than the wavelength of light used by human eyes, and so are literally invisible. The M2 Ultra by Apple (June 2023), has 134 billion transistors. It is used for high-end laptops and desktops. There are still ever-more-staggering numbers in the works. An Intel executive once remarked that the number of transistors on a chip made might well exceed the number of neurons in the human brain.

• 1971, Nov: The Sabotage Convention signed where states agree to prohibit and punish behaviour which may threaten the safety of civil aviation. It is officially the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation. It was adopted by the International Conference on Air Law in Montreal and thus is also called the Montreal Convention. It has 188 state parties. (The association that represents the families of the victims of the Ukrainian airplane shot down in 2020 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are trying to get Iran to submit to arbitration under this Convention – which Iran signed.)

• 1971, Dec: Doctors Without Borders was launched by two doctors who wanted to start a new humanitarian group that was focussed on providing medical care to individuals, regardless of their race, gender, politics or religion. The group would prioritize the welfare of others instead of national borders. It now has 40,000 staff members working in more than 65 countries

• 1971, Dec: The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 was a military confrontation between India and Pakistan that occurred during the Bangladesh Liberation War in East Pakistan. Thirteen days after the war started, India achieved a clear upper hand, and the Eastern Command of the Pakistan military surrendered, marking the formation of East Pakistan as the new nation of Bangladesh. The geographical distance between the eastern and western wings of Pakistan was vast; East Pakistan lay over 1,600 kilometres away, which greatly hampered any attempt to integrate the Bengali and the Pakistani cultures. As a result of the war, East Pakistan became an independent country, Bangladesh, as the world’s fourth most populous Muslim state in December 1971. West Pakistan, was then just Pakistan

• 1971-72: The US Apollo 14, 15, 16, 17 spacecraft all on moon, then no more. The last ones to be on moon with Apollo 17 were Capt Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt. No humans have travelled beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17. The total cost of the US moon program, which included the earlier Gemini missions, has been estimated at US$288-billion (current $s)

• 1972, Jan: Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland: 13 demonstrators were killed by the British army in Londonderry. The result was a sharp increase in sectarian violence, with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) finding many new recruits  

• 1972, Feb: Richard Nixon met Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedongin Beijing, in a visit that Nixon hailed as “the week that changed the world”. This marked the culmination of the Nixon administration’s resumption of harmonious relations between the US and Mainland China after years of diplomatic isolation. It was the first time a US president had visited the People’s Republic of China; it ended 25 years of no communication or diplomatic ties between the two countries and was the key step in normalizing relations between the two countries. It resulted in the Shanghai Communiqué which represented the US first diplomatic negotiations with the People’s Republic of China since its 1949 founding. Nixon visited the PRC also to gain more leverage over relations with the Soviet Union. The visit resulted in a significant shift in the Cold War balance, driving a wedge between the Soviet Union and China and resulting in significant Soviet concessions to the US. The trip also spawned China’s opening to the world and economic parity with capitalist countries. As a result of Nixon’s trip the two sides formally established diplomatic relations in 1978, and since then subsequent administrations have followed the path of engagement (See “1945, Jan”)

• 1972, March: “The Limits to Growth” published – a report written for the Club of Rome that became an unlikely best-seller. It warned of societal collapse if the world did not recognize the environmental costs of human activity

• 1972: An illustrated sex manual, The Joy of Sex, played a part in the sexual revolution going on throughout the Western world. It was published by British author Alex Comfort and played a part in the sexual revolution going on from the 1960s to the 1970s. (For example, “Deep Throat”, the wildly successful hardcore film of 1972, thrust porn into the mainstream.) Comfort’s manual aimed to demystify sex and teach people how to enjoy it. After all, the idea that sex should be joyful was far from an obvious one at the time. In contrast to the lifeless prose of sexologists and scientists, “The Joy of Sex” stood apart for its relaxed, approachable style and its emphasis on pleasure. The book did display the lingering conservatism of the era’s sexual politics and a revised edition since omitted some offensive references. Despite those flaws, the book has aged well

• 1972, May: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) which resulted in the first treaty between the US and the USSR, known as SALT I. Of the resulting complex of agreements, the most important were the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Systems and the Interim Agreement and Protocol on Limitation of Strategic Offensive Weapons. By signing SALT I, they agreed to a limited number of ballistic missiles, as well as a limited number of missile deployment sites. They were intended to restrain the arms race in strategic (long-range or intercontinental) ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons (See “1991, July”)

• 1972, June: The Connaught Medical Research Laboratories was sold to the Canada Development Corporation (CDC), a Crown corporation, and was then completely privatized in 1989 by being sold to sold to Mérieux and a decade later became Aventus. In 2004, Aventis was acquired by Sanofi. Today, the Connaught Laboratories’ facilities are known as the “Connaught Campus” of Sanofi Pasteur. Back in the early 20th century, Canada was at the forefront of the vaccine industry in the world, in part thanks to Connaught. The original institution was likened to the Pasteur Institutes in France and Belgium and the Lister Institute in London

• 1972, June: The Iraq Petroleum Company was nationalized under the direction of Saddam Hussein. This was a decisive step in the modern history of Iraq, as it provided the country with a massive source of revenue at a time when the oil price was about to soar. This action against the economic instrument and symbol of Britain’s dominance over the country echoed Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956

• 1972, June: The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (the Stockholm Conference) took place in Stockholm. Maurice Strong (a Canadian diplomat) was elected to be the first head of UN Environment. He was also secretary-general of both the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 Earth Summit. The mandate of UNEP is to provide leadership, deliver science and develop solutions on a wide range of issues, including climate change, the management of marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and green economic development. In 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and UNEP established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (See “1988”, “2007, Dec” and 2023, Dec”)

• 1972, June: Start of the Watergate scandal when five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC. The prowlers were connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, and they had been caught wiretapping phones and stealing documents.The dogged reporting of two Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, raised questions and suggested connections between Richard Nixon’s controversial reelection campaign and the men awaiting trial. A special Senate committee was established. Its revelations later prompted the impeachment process against Nixon himself, which featured the introduction of three articles of impeachment and led to Nixon’s resignation August 1974 (See “1974, Aug”)

• 1972, Sept: Bobby Fischer became the first American to claim the world chess championship. He beat the defending Champion, Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union, in the “Match of the Century”. The Soviet Union dominated chess; all the world champions since the end of WWII had been Soviets. The Fischer-Spassky match thus became a metaphorical battle in the Cold War. The match attached more worldwide interest than any championship before or since. At age 15, Fischer (1943-2008) was also the youngest chess grandmaster (See “1985, Nov”)

• 1972, Sept: Israeli athletes and coaches were attacked and held hostage during the Olympics in Munich, Germany. The Palestine terrorist group, Black September killed eleven. West German police ambushed the terrorists, and killed five of the eight Black September members, but the rescue attempt failed and all of the hostages were killed. The three surviving perpetrators who were arrested, only to be released the next month in the hostage exchange that followed the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615. The liberated Munich attackers were granted asylum by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi 

• 1972, Sept: Canada won the Canada-USSR Series in hockey. This was an eight-game ice hockey series between the Soviet Union and Canada. The final game was won in dramatic fashion, with the Canadians overcoming a two-goal Soviet lead after two periods; the Canadians scored three times in the third, the final goal scored with 34 seconds left by Paul Henderson. The series was played during the Cold War, and intense feelings of nationalism were aroused in fans in both Canada and the Soviet Union and players on the ice

• 1972, Nov:  The designation of World Heritage Sites determined: UNESCO adopted the “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage”. As of March 2022, it has been ratified by 194 states. By assigning places as World Heritage Sites, UNESCO wants to help to pass them on to future generations

• 1972, Nov: The first officially recognized International soccer game took place in Glasgow, Scotland. (England and Scotland tied. Note: they’ve played 115 times; England won 48; Scotland 41; tied 26.)

• 1972, Dec: The final mission of NASA’s Apollo space program, the most recent time humans have set foot on the Moon or traveled beyond low Earth orbit. Commander Gene Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon. The mission broke several records for crewed spaceflight

• 1972: The first email message.It was sent over the ARPANET network. The message was “QWERTYUIOP”. Now over 100 billion emails are sent and received each day

• 1973, Jan: Nixon announces end of Vietnam War. This resulted from theParis Peace Accords. The treaty included the governments of North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam); South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam); the US; and the Republic of South Vietnam (PRG), which represented South Vietnamese communists. North Vietnam took over the South in 1975. As Pulitzer Prize winner, David Shribman, said “For decades it has been an American dividing line: when innocence ended, when mass dissent began, when mendacity became the political norm, when the American moral compass went haywire, perhaps when the country’s will failed.” (See “1955, Nov-1975, Apr”, “1964, Aug” and “1975, April”)

• 1973, Jan: The Roe v. Wade landmark abortion decision of the US Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the US Constitution generally protects a pregnant individual’s liberty to have an abortion and that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional. The Court held that a set of Texas statutes criminalizing abortion in most instances violated a woman’s constitutional right of privacy, which it found to be implicit in the liberty guarantee of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (“…nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”). Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022 (See “2022, June”)

• 1973, March:Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was invented by Paul Lauterbur who developed a mechanism to encode spatial information into an NMR signal using magnetic field gradients. The first live human subject was imaged in 1977. MRI machines became commercially available in the 1980s, and are now commonly used for imaging internal body structures, especially soft tissues like the brain

• 1973, March: The Group of Seven (G7) was formed. It is an intergovernmental political forum consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan (the only Asian country in the G7), the UK and the US; additionally, the European Union (EU). Russia was a formal member (as part of the Group of Eight) from 1997 to 2014, but was booted out in 2014 after annexing Crimea from Ukraine. G7 members are large International Monetary Fund advanced economies and account for over half of global net wealth (at over $200 trillion), 30 to 43% percent of global gross domestic product, and 10% of the world’s population (770 million people). The responsibility of hosting the G7 is rotated through the member states with the holder of the presidency setting the agenda (See “2023, May”)

• 1973, April: The first call on a handheld mobile phone was made by a Motorola employee, Martin Cooper, on a 2kg handset. By 1993 the first SMS text messages were being sent and data services were beginning to appear on phone screens. Mobile phones now reach nearly 90% of the global population

• 1973: The Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS) project was started by the US Department of Defense. Roger Easton, who worked for the US Navy’s then-named Space Applications Branch, realized that the simple fact of the perceived difference in the time noted by clocks in two different geographic locations gave him a number from which (because light travels at a certain fixed absolute velocity) he could calculate the distance between the two locations. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology for being the system’s principal inventor. GPS as a working system was formally inaugurated in 1978, and while owned by the US government, is fully available to civilians, with almost no restrictions (See “1957, Oct” and “1983, Sept”)

• 1973, June: Canadian jockey Ron Turcotte road Secretariat to win in what some consider the greatest horse race in history. It was in the Belmont Stakes and was the fastest the 1.5-mile race has ever been run; the margin of victory – 31 lengths – stands as the largest in the race’s 155 years and was a world record. It was the final race that clinched the US Triple Crown, where at the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness they also set records that still last

• 1973, Sept: Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in a coup d’état, with the support of the US, that toppled the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende’s democratically elected left-wing Unidad Popular government and ended civilian rule. He ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. After his rise to power, Pinochet persecuted leftists, socialists, and political critics, resulting in the executions of 1,200 to 3,200 people, the internment of as many as 80,000 people, and the torture of tens of thousands. According to the Chilean government, the number of executions and forced disappearances was at least 3,095. Pinochet was finally charged with human rights abuses plus tax evasion and died in prison in 2006. Only now in 2023, for the first time Chile’s government will search for the remains of people who disappeared, exhume the remains, and through DNA evidence trace family origins

• 1973, Oct: The Sydney Opera House opened 16 years after a Danish architect selection as winner of an international design competition. It featured a modern expressionist design, with a series of large precast concrete “shells” forming the roof. It was completed by an Australian architectural team ten years late and 1,357% over budget. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. 

• 1973, Oct: The Yom Kippur War (or the Fourth Arab-Israeli War). Egypt attacked Israel from the south, and Syrian troops invaded from the north, catching Israel completely off guard. Although Israel ultimately regained the offensive, it suffered many early casualties and lost its sense of invincibility. This paved the way for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. (See the 1978 Camp David Accords and the subsequent 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty (See “1978, Sept”)

• 1973, Oct: OPEC shut off exports of Arab crude to the US. This embargo quadrupled the crude oil price from US$2.90 a barrel to $11.60 by January 1974. The increase was in retaliation for Western support of Israel against Egypt and Syria during the Yom Kipper War (and the decline in the US dollar – the denominated currency for oil sales). The result was long queues at service stations. The embargo was lifted in March 1974 but high prices remained. The crisis brought about the realization that natural resources would not always be cheap and plentiful

• 1973, Oct: The Saturday Night Massacre was a series of events that took place in the US during the Watergate scandal. The trigger was the discovery that US President Richard Nixon had secretly taped Oval Office conversations. He resisted the efforts of Special Prosecutor Archibald Fox to gain access to the tapes. Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Fox; Richardson refused and resigned effective immediately. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox; Ruckelshaus refused, and also resigned. Nixon then ordered the third-most-senior official at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox. Bork carried out the dismissal as Nixon asked. This was when people suddenly saw that Nixon might actually be the crook they thought he was. This set in motion critical events in the American political scene: whether presidents are above the law; limits of presidential behaviour; controversies over whether presidents are vulnerable to prosecution; defiance of judicial orders; disrespect of independent judicial investigators (See “1974, Aug”)

• 1974-1983: The dirty war in Argentina – the period of state terrorism as a part of Operation Condor.  During this period military and security forces and right wing death squads hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism or left-wing Peronism, which has been defined as “a vague blend of nationalism and labourism or populism (and named after Juan Perón, who with his wife Evita, were immensely popular among the Argentine working class.)

• 1974, April: The Carnation Revolution in Portugal was a military coup of left-leaning military officers that overthrew the authoritarian Estato Novo government

• 1974: India became a nuclear power. It has approximately 150 nuclear warheads, and has land-based, sea-based and air-launch nuclear capabilities. The state had declared a No First Use policy, which means they have vowed to never use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. However, as of August 2019, India said they are reconsidering this policy. (See “1998”)

• 1974: Stephen Hawking developed a theoretical argument for the existence of Black-body radiation, now called Hawking radiation. The discovery was widely accepted as a major breakthrough in theoretical physics. Hawking (1942-2018) was the Lucian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world. Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He was a vigorous supporter of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) age 21

• 1974, July: Turkey invades Cyprus leading to the occupation of the northern part of the island. The aim of the coup was the union of Cyprus with Greece. The ceasefire line from August 1974 became the UN Buffer Zone and is commonly referred to as the Green Line. The occupation, which remains today, is viewed as illegal under international law, amounting to an illegal occupation of European Union territory since Cyprus became a member

• 1974, Aug: Richard Nixon resigns the US presidency rather than face impeachment proceedings in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Before his resignation, Nixon had appointed Gerald Ford to be VP, to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in 1973 for legal problems of his own. Gerald Ford was sworn in following Nixon’s resignation and became the only US president never to have run in an election for national office (See “1972, June” and “1973, Oct”)

• 1974, Nov: The Chicago Declaration offered a clear Evangelical challenge to the accepted divide between conservative orthodoxy and social justice, emphasizing the biblical call to care for the marginalized. At a time when many Americans evangelicals were increasingly grappling with the role of political action and social justice in American religious life, this declaration emerged as a call for action. Subsequent meetings launched Christians for Social Justice as a national membership organization in 1978. The Declaration was meant to address what was perceived as a gap between Christian faith and a commitment to social justice. What really emerged was the rise of the religious right in the 1970s, likely a response to a whole series of rapid, disorienting changes in social and moral changes. The 1960s ushered in the feminist movement and the sexual revolution. There was Woodstock and the Stonewall Riots, the National Organization of Women, and a wave of campus uprisings. Then in the 1970s a whole series of issues – the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights ordinances, the IRS threatening to strip Bob Jones University of its tax-exempt status because of its policy against interracial dating, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion – convinced many evangelicals and fundamentalists that their values were being subverted, their way of life assaulted (See “1969, June”, “1979, June”)

• 1974, Nov: The International Energy Agency (IEA) was established as a result of the 1973-1974 oil crisis, when industrialized countries found they were not adequately equipped to deal with the oil embargo imposed by major producers that pushed prices to historically high levels. The current 31 member countries and 11 association countries of the IEA represent 75% of global energy demand 

• 1975: The world’s population reached four billion. In 2023 it reached 7.6 billion people (See “1700”, “1800”, “1900” and “2022, Nov”)

• 1975: The Seven Mountain Mandate (or Seven Mountains Dominionism) movement began. Its followers believe it started with a purported message from God delivered to three evangelicals ordering them to invade the “seven spheres” of society, identified as family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. The movement (a dominionist conservative Christian sector within Pentecostal and evangelic Christianity) came to prominence after the 2013 publication of Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate. The movement is generally supportive of the presidency of Donald Trump, with member Paula White becoming Trump’s spiritual advisor. White claimed that Trump “will play a critical role in Armageddon as the United States stands alongside Israel in the battle against Islam.” In 2020  Charlie Kirk (an American right-wing political activist – look him up; he’s dangerous!) said “finally we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence” during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference 

• 1975, April: Canada officially went metric but there are many day-to-day measurements for which Canadians have not forgotten their imperial roots, especially older Canadians, who were schooled in a system of pounds and gallons instead of kilograms and litres. Canadians think of their own height in feet and inches, but have abandoned miles in favour of kilometres when measuring travel distance. Though Celsius is the norm for air temperature, 76% think in terms of Fahrenheit when setting their ovens (See “1670”)

• 1975, April: The fall of Saigon and the US pulls out of Vietnam. The last few Americans still in South Vietnam were airlifted out of the country as Saigon fell to communist forces. Over 58,000 Americans died in the conflict, plus as many as 2 million civilians in both North and South Vietnam and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. (The US military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war.) American aircraft dropped over 5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam – the largest bombardment of any country in history – and more than twice as much tonnage as the US Air Force dropped in all of WWII. Over 4 million tons fell on the mostly rural areas of the former South Vietnam, plus 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of herbicides. This compares with approximately 2 million tons on Laos and half a million tons on Cambodia.The country remains today one of five communist countries of the world, along with China, Laos, Cuba and North Korea. The Vietnam memory remains one of Americas ever recurring curses of their militant history (See “1955, Nov-1975, Apr”, “1964, Aug” and “1973, Jan”)

• 1975: The Canadian federal government created Petro-Canada, a Canadian crown corporation, in response to the world energy crisis. In 1976, Petro-Canada purchased Atlantic Richfield Canada, in 1978 Pacific Petroleums, and in 1981 the Canadian operations of Petrofina. Most of the original Petro-Canada refineries and service stations were acquired from BP Canada in 1983. Petro-Canada was involved in the massive Hibernia oil find off Newfoundland and was a partner in the Syncrude oil sands venture in Fort McMurray, Alberta. The Alberta oil industry was then overwhelmingly owned by Americans, who were also the major importer of Albertan oil. In 1990, the Mulroney government announced its intention to privatize the company which it gradually did. In August 2009, Petro-Canada merged with Suncor Energy

• 1975: Canada starts development of the Canadarm (officially Shuttle Remote Manipulator System or SRMS). It is is a series of robotic arms that are used on the Space Shuttle orbiters to deploy, manoeuvre, and capture payloads. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) signed a memorandum of understanding that Canada would develop and construct the Canadarm. NRC awarded the manipulator contract to Spar Aerospace (now MDA). The first Canadarm was delivered to NASA in April 1981. In all, five arms – Nos. 201, 202, 301, 302, and 303 – were built and delivered to NASA. Arm 302 was lost in the Challenger accident (See “1990, April”)

• 1975, May: The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional political and economic union of fifteen countries located in West Africa, was created. They are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Collectively, these countries comprise an area of 5,114,162 km², and in 2019 had an estimated population of over 387 million. The bloc struggled to advance its agenda due to extreme political volatility and perpetual civil wars crippling many of its members. Acknowledging that true economic integration can only be built upon sustainable peace and political stability, it revised its founding treaty in July 1993 to include a mandate to facilitate peace, security and stability in West Africa. 

• Note: In January 2024, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have withdrawn from the bloc, according to their respective juntas, as the bloc has “moved away from the ideals of its founding fathers and pan-Africanism” and that ECOWAS is “under the threat of foreign powers”. These three states have created a defence pact called the Alliance of Sahel States and blame foreigners for everything that goes wrong. These countries have a lethal combination of extreme poverty, a very high ratio of population to usable land, a very high birth rate that is showing no signs of decline, and the final days of well-intentioned foreign interventions (See “2023, July”)

• 1975, June: Pet Rock introduced. It was a collectible toy that was marketed as live rocks, in custom cardboard boxes, complete with straw and breathing holes. The fad lasted about six months, ending during the Christmas season. The creator sold over 1 million Pet Rocks for $4 each, and became a millionaire

• 1975, July: Jimmy Hoffa, the American labour union leader disappeared. It is generally accepted that he was murdered by the Mafia. Hoffa served as the president of the  International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) from 1957 until 1971, which eventually became the largest by membership in the US during his terms as its leader. Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964. He was imprisoned in 1967 and sentenced to 13 years. It has been speculated that his legacy may be the way Americans think of unions as opposed to Canadians, fostering the feeling that union corruption is rampant. Today only about 10% of US workers belong to unions, while in Canada the number is 29%

• 1975, Aug: The Helsinki Final Act (Helsinki Accords) signed by then-existing European countries, US, Canada (altogether 35 participating states); an attempt to improve the détente between the East and the West

• 1975: Invention of the digital camera. A engineer from Eastman Kodak, Steven Sassoon, developed this so-called “portable” camera, that weighed 8 pounds. Kodak introduced its first commercially available camera in 1994, or 19 years after its invention. Digital cameras democratized the previously esoteric art of photography, and brought it to the masses. This “disruptive innovation” was that indeed: in 1976 Kodak accounted for 90% of film and 85% of camera sales in the US; in 2012 it filed for bankruptcy

• 1975, Oct: Muhammad Ali defeated Joe Frazier in what some consider the greatest prizefight of all time (the “Thrilla in Manilla”). Ali was an American boxer and one of the greatest sporting figures of the 20th century. An Olympic gold medalist and the first fighter to capture the heavyweight title three times, Ali (1942-2016) won 56 times in his 21-year professional career. His outspokenness on issues of race, religion and politics made him a controversial figure during his career. Born Cassius Clay Jr., Ali changed his name in 1964 after joining the Nation of Islam. Citing his religious beliefs, he refused military induction and was stripped of his heavyweight championship and banned from boxing for three years during the prime of his career

• 1975, Dec: A terrorist kidnapping of Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani and other ministers at the OPEC gathering in Vienna, Austria. Three people were killed and 11 taken hostage by a group led by Carlos the Jackal, the most notorious international terrorist of the era. The oil ministers were taken to North Africa in a hijacked plane in a $1 billion ransom drama

• 1975, through to 1989: Operation Condor was a US-backed campaign of political repression in many South American countries. It involved transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination of opponents. The program was developed following a series of government coup d’états by military groups, primarily in the 1960s and 1970s: General Alfredo Stroessner took control of Paraguay in 1954; the Brazilian military overthrew the president João Goulart in 1964; General Hugo Banzer took power in Bolivia in 1971 through a series of coups; a dictatorship seized power in Uruguay in 1973; Chilean armed forces commanded by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew democratically elected president Salvador Allende; General Francisco Morales Bermúdez took control of Peru after a successful coup in 1975; a military junta headed by General Jorge Videla seized power in Argentina in 1976. One of the fundamental missions of Condor was the liquidation of “top-level terrorist leaders” 

• 1976, May: A human rights organization was created to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with the Helsinki Accords was formed. It was called The Moscow Helsinki Group. The aim of the accords was to improve relations between the Communist bloc and Western countries, and to that end it established terms of cooperation between the signatories on various political and economic matters. Yet its provisions were non-binding. At the time of their signing, the Helsinki Accords met with quite a bit of skepticism among Western politicians about their likely effect on Soviet behaviour. To Russian dissidents, the agreement represented a clear betrayal by Western powers, who had given Moscow everything it wanted in exchange for empty promises. Since the end of WW II, the Soviet Union had wanted the world to recognize the Baltic Republics, which it had obtained from Hitler, as its own; the Helsinki Accords made this a reality. For years the Soviet Union had wanted Eastern Europe to remain as its protectorate; the Helsinki signatories agreed. And despite these imperialistic policies, the Soviet Union wanted economic cooperation with the West; once again, its negotiating partners gave in 

• 1976, June: The Soweto uprising was a series of demonstrations and protests led by black school children in South Africa during apartheid. Students from various schools began to protest in the streets of the Soweto township in response to the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in black schools. It is estimated that 20,000 students took part in the protests. They were met with fierce police brutality, and many were shot and killed. The number of pupils killed in the uprising is usually estimated as 176, but some sources estimate as many as 700 fatalities. The riots were a key moment in the fight against apartheid as it sparked renewed opposition against apartheid in South Africa both domestically and internationally

• 1976, June: The CN Tower in Toronto was completed. It remains the tallest free-standing structure on land in the Western Hemisphere at 1,815.3 ft. In 1995, the CN Tower was declared one of the modern Seven Wonders of the World. The Tower held the record for the world’s tallest tower until 2011 when it was surpassed by the Tokyo Skytree

• 1976, July: The US-launched Viking I lands on Mars, the first successful Mars lander in history. It operated on Mars for 2307 days (over 61⁄4 years) or 2245 Martian solar days, the longest Mars surface mission until the record was broken by the Opportunity rover on May 19, 2010 

• 1976, July: The first home computer produced (Apple 1). Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer. They designed a self-contained unit; it had a keyboard to enter data, a screen to view output, and some form of storage to hold data and programs, plus it had software, in order to appeal to anyone other than a computer enthusiast. Other companies followed: IBM did a deal with a fledgling company, Microsoft. They also decided to offer open architecture, so that others could copy them. The Apple II, introduced in 1977 was the first widely used personal computer (followed by the IBM PC in 1981) (See “1981, Aug”)

• 1976, July: The 1976 Tangshan, China earthquake was the deadliest earthquake in China. In minutes, 85% of the buildings in Tangshan collapsed or were rendered unusable, all services failed, and most of the highway and railway bridges collapsed or were seriously damaged. Scholars accept at least 300,000 died

• 1976, Oct: The Gang of Four in China charged with a series of treasonous crimes (one month after Mao Zedong’s death). The gang’s leading figure was Jiang Qing (Mao’s last wife). They were officially blamed by the Chinese government for the worst excesses of the societal chaos that ensued during the ten years of turmoil of the Cultural Revolution 

• 1976, Nov: Party Québécois elected in Quebec. In one of the most significant elections in Quebec history itwon 71 of 110 seats in the provincial National Assembly, and René Lévesque was elected premier. The following year the Assembly decreed French the only official language of government and business in Quebec (Bill 101). (Then in 1980 Lévesque organized a referendum seeking approval for the provincial government to negotiate a new status and relationship with the rest of Canada (See “1980, May”)

• 1977, Jan: The youth volunteer program in Canada, Katimavik, was founded. It provides opportunities for young Canadians to participate in five to six-month periods of community service throughout the country via the National Experience program. Participants volunteer at least 30 hours a week and engage in workshops and activities with their fellow group members and project leader.

• 1977, April: The PC modem is invented by Dennis Hayes and Dale Hetherington. Without this device there’s no telling how data would be transferred today, at what speeds, and what other inventions and services would not have been created or discovered if the modem hadn’t helped make data readily available

• 1977, April: The Berger Royal Commission in Canada findings made public. It recommended a 10 year ban on pipelines in Canada’s Mackenzie Valley plus settlement of indigenous land claims first. Finally by 2000, the Inuvialuit. Gwich’in, and Sahtu Got’ine had all reached agreements with the federal government. (This was all as a result of vast natural gas reserves found at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.)

• 1977, May: A turning point in the National Rifle Association’s history, marked a move away from “hunting, conservation, and marksmanship” and toward the defence of the right to bear arms. The “Revolt at Cincinnati” took place at the group’s 1977 annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. The resulting new leadership increased funding for its lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA). The NRA-ILA was given freedom to support the rights to “keep and bear arms”. The NRA redefined its stance on gun control, defending protections provided by the Second Amendment 

• 1977, Oct: The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was diagnosed. It has been responsible for an estimated 300-500 million deaths during the 20th century. The World Health Organisation initiated an eradication campaign in 1958, and intensified it in 1967

• 1978-1989: China’s “market socialism” period. During this period Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader of China. He led the country through a series of far-reaching market-economy reforms including being open to foreign trade and economic reforms – the de facto privatization of farming, modernization of industry, and partial return to private enterprise (still mixed with socialist ideology – dubbed “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or “market socialism”). In December 1978 Deng declared that China would turn its focus from political struggle to economic development. (Kind of similar to the “trickle-down” theory popularized by US president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.) Within days China and the US announced that they would establish political ties. These two events marked the end of China as a hermit country and the start of its evolution into a superpower. (The side bar to this is the current direction Xi Jinping is taking China: aligning the country closer to Russia while alienating countries that helped China develop over the decades that followed 1978; turning his diplomats into confrontational warriors on the international stage; using China’s economic weight to coerce any company or country that dares criticize it.)

• 1978: The famous feminist metaphor coined – “the glass ceiling”, a phrase used by Marilyn Laden, an HR consultant, describing the invisible barrier to advancement for women in the workplace

• 1978: The Turner Diaries, the “bible of the racist right”, was published. This book sold some 500,000 copies, gaining tremendous popularity both in the white power movement and around the mercenary soldier circuit. It worked as a foundational how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for a race war. Among many radical actions it suggested the use nuclear weapons to clear first the US and then the world of nonwhite populations. It has also inspired numerous hate crimes and acts of terrorism, including the 1984 assassination of Alan Berg (an American talk radio show host), the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1999 London nail bombings (See “1995, April”)

• 1978, March: Aldo Moro was kidnapped in Rome by members of the militant left-wing Red Brigades. Moro was past leader of the Christian Democratic Party, who served five times as premier of Italy. After 54 days of captivity, during which government officials repeatedly refused to release 13 members of the Red Brigades on trial, Moro was murdered by the terrorist kidnappers. A series of trials and parliamentary investigations followed, and several members of the Red Brigades were convicted for their involvement; however, a number of mysteries still surround the incident

• 1978, April: The April Coup in Afghanistan. The then Afghan president, Daoud Khan and most of his family, were executed, The successful People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA – a Marxist-Leninist political party) uprising resulted in the creation of a socialist Afghan government that was closely aligned with the Soviet Union. It was a significant event in the county’s history as it marked the beginning of decades of continuous conflict

• 1978, July: First test tube babies born after conception by in vitro fertilization (IVF) following a procedure pioneered in Britain. It has been lauded among “the most remarkable medical breakthroughs of the 20th Century” 

• 1978, Sept: The Camp David Accords that followed the Yom Kippur war saw Israel return the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and the subsequent 1979 Egyptian-Israel peace treaty, which marked the first instance of an Arab country recognizing Israel. Following peace with Israel, Egypt continued its drift away from the Soviet Union and eventually left the Soviet sphere of influence entirely. Due to the agreement, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli PM Menachem Begin received the shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately Sadat was killed by fundamentalist Egyptian army officers at a military parade

• 1978, Nov: Jonestown mass murder-suicides. Jim Jones, an American cult leader and self-professed faith healer, who founded an organization that would become the Peoples Temple, coerced the mass murder-suicide of 918 of his followers in Jonestown, Guyana

• 1979, Jan: The United States strategically switched diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China (ROC) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), to counter the political influences and military threats from the Soviet Union. The US Embassy in Taipei was “migrated’ to Beijing and the Taiwanese Embassy in the US was closed. Following the termination of diplomatic relations, the US terminated its Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan. Over the past four decades, the US government’s policy of deliberate ambiguity toward Taiwan has been viewed as critical to stabilizing cross-strait relations by seeking to deter the PRC from using force toward the region and dissuade Taiwan from seeking independence (See “2024, Jan”)

• 1979, Jan: Vietnamese troops overthrow the brutal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Vietnamese troops seize the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. Two million Cambodians had died at the hands of his Khmer Rouge regime and Pol Pot’s troops had conducted bloody cross-border raids into Vietnam, Cambodia’s historic enemy, massacring civilians and torching villages. (The Khmer Rouge controlled Democratic Kampuchea, which was a one-party totalitarian state which encompassed modern-day Cambodia and existed from 1975 to 1979.) Explanations still being sought for the widespread violence that was carried out by Cambodians against Cambodians

• 1979, March: The Egypt–Israel peace treaty made Egypt the first Arab state to officially recognize Israel. The main features of the treaty were mutual recognition, cessation of the state of war that had existed since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, normalization of relations and the withdrawal by Israel of its armed forces and civilians from the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured during the Six-Day War in 1967. Egypt agreed to leave the Sinai Peninsula demilitarized. The agreement provided for free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal, and recognition of the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba as international waterways, which had been blockaded by Egypt in 1967. The agreement also called for an end to Israeli military rule over the Israeli-occupied and the establishment of full autonomy for the Palestinian inhabitants of the territories, terms that were not implemented but which became the basis for the Oslo Accords

• 1979, March: The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor (TMI-2) of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It is the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power plant history. On the seven-point event scale the accident is rated Level 5, an “Accident with Wider Consequences”. The accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, and led to new regulations for the nuclear industry. It accelerated the decline of efforts to build new reactors (See “1986, Apr” and ”2011, March”)

• 1979, March: Islamic Revolution in Iran that brought on an oppressive regime, especially for women. The country’s clerical rulers seized power. Following a referendum, 98% of Iranian voters approved the country’s shift to an Islamic Republic. The monarchy was officially brought down and Ayatollah Khomeini assumed leadership over Iran (he died in 1989). The result: a pro-Western secular authoritarian monarchy was replaced by an anti-Western Islamist theocracy (plus a Shia revival and an uprooting of the existing dominant Arab Sunni hegemony in the Middle East plus conflict with Saudi Arabia). The Islamic revolutionaries issued as one of their first acts after taking power, a decree about the mandatory veiling of women and dissolving the Family Protection Act of 1975, which gave women the right to divorce and restricted polygamy for men. They also lowered the marriage age for girls from 18 to 9. Today a woman’s testimony in court is worth half a man’s and she cannot obtain a passport or travel without the written permission of her male guardian (See “1979, Oct”)

• 1979, April: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former PM of Pakistan, was executed. He had been deposed in a military coup before being controversially tried by the Supreme Court of Pakistan for authorizing the murder of a political opponent. During his premiership, Bhutto succeeded in uniting all the parties in getting the 1973 constitution enacted.  His embraced nuclear weapons for Pakistan thus was considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear-deterrence programme, which he pursued in spite of strong opposition from the US. He is blamed by some for causing the Bangladesh Liberation War. His eldest daughter, Benazir Bhutto, was twice Prime Minister of Pakistan, and was assassinated in 2007

• 1979, May: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK (through to 1990). She was the first female British prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. As prime minister, she implemented policies that became known as Thatcherism. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the “Iron Lady“, a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasized deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), the privatization of state-pwned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions

• 1979, June: Baptist minister, Gerry Falwell, founded the Moral Majority, an American political organization associated with the Christian Right and the Republican Party. It played a key role in the mobilization of conservative Christians as a political force and particularly in Republican presidential victories throughout the 1980s. (In 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, in a landslide, winning about two-thirds of the evangelical vote; the mass migration of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians to the Republican Party was well on the way.) Falwell had begun a series of “I love America” rallies in 1976 because of what he perceived to be a decay in the nation’s morality (See “1974, Nov”)

• 1979, June: Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was ousted by a left wing political movement – the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) led by Daniel Ortega. (The dictator, Anastasia Somoza Debayle, ruled Nicaragua since 1936.) Ironically though, the revolution that launched an ambitious program of social reform, including land distribution, a literary drive, and mass vaccination, soon became mired in a bloody decade-long guerrilla war, fuelled in large part by Cold War animosities abroad. Seeking to suppress the spread of communism in Latin America, US president Ronald Reagan had authorized support for anti-Sandinista guerrilla groups known as the Contras (heavily backed by the CIA). In response, the Sandinista regime embarked on a ferocious effort to flush the Contras out of the country. The great irony in Nicaragua was that the Sandinista regime embraced the same authoritarian tendencies it had fought to uproot (See “1990, Feb”)

• 1979, June: The US and Soviet Union sign a SALT II agreement. It would have placed further limits on their nuclear weapons and launch platforms, including strategic bombers, and imposed certain notification requirements and new testing bans. But in December, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, starting a nine-year war in which its forces and allied Afghan communists battle the US-funded mujahideen resistance. President Jimmy Carter responds to the Soviet invasion by asking the Senate to freeze consideration of the SALT II treaty and by pulling the country out of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow

• 1979, July: Sony introduces the Walkman – the first personal stereo cassette player, making it the most successful audio product of the 1980’s. It converged technologies: the transistor (which enabled miniaturization) and the compact cassette. It became one of the most popular consumer devices in history

• 1979, Nov: The Greensboro massacre was a deadly confrontation in Greensboro, North Carolina when members of the American Nazi Party (ANP) and the Ku Klux Klan (marking an early convergence of these movements) shot and killed five participants in a “Death to the Klan” march which was organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP). An all-white jury acquitted the defendants in state and federal trials. The confrontation heralded a paramilitary white power movement mobilized for violence, and also revealed a legal system broadly unprepared to convict its perpetrators 

• 1979, Nov: The Iran hostage crisis and the “Canadian Caper”. Angered by president Jimmy Carter allowing the fatally ill Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to receive cancer treatment in the US, the new Iranian regime demanded his return in order to stand trial for the crimes he was accused of committing against Iranians during his rule through his secret police. Strident demonstrators climbed over the fence at the US embassy and seized 52 hostages. The Iranian demands were rejected, which Iran saw as US complicity in those abuses. The 444-day crisis transfixed America; all the captives were released in January 1981 (on Ronald Regan’s inauguration). A side-bar to the crisis was the “Canadian Caper” – the joint covert rescue by the Canadian government through its Ambassador Ken Taylor and and the CIA of six American diplomats who had evaded capture during the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, Iran. The “caper” involved a CIA officer joining the six diplomats in Tehran to form a fake film crew. It was purportedly made up of six individuals with Canadian passports who were finishing scouting for an appropriate location to shoot a scene for the science-fiction film Argo (See “1979, March”)

• 1979, Dec: Start of Soviet War in Afghanistan. Soviet operatives killed the president Hafizullah Amin, kickstarting the 10-year Soviet-Afghan War. The invasion added new fuel to Cold War tensions. For the next decade, Moscow tried to quell resistance from anti-communist Muslim fighters, known as mujahideen, who were supported by aid from the West. The invasion was a contributing factor to the dissolution of the Soviet Union; they withdrew in 1989. The decision by the Soviet Union to directly intervene in Afghanistan was based on the Brezhnev Doctrine (a policy that proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in any state of the Soviet Bloc in Central and Eastern Europe was a threat to them all, and therefore justified the intervention of fellow socialist states). It was the Soviet Vietnam. The involvement of the foreign powers made the war a proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union. The conflict led to the deaths of between 562,000 and 2,000,000 Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees

• 1980: The National Rifle Association in the US endorsed Ronald Reagan. This was the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate, and showed an abrupt change in what had, until 1977, been a sporting organization that emphasized gun safety and rejected the idea of working with manufacturers of guns and ammunition. It had formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

• 1980, April: The country of Rhodesia achieved internationally recognized independence as Zimbabwe. The rapid decolonization of Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s alarmed a significant proportion of Southern Rhodesia’s white population. In an effort to delay the transition to black majority rule, the predominantly white Southern Rhodesian government issued its own Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom in November 1965. This sparked a civil conflict through to 1979. War weariness, diplomatic pressure, and an extensive trade embargo imposed by the UN prompted Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith to concede to majority rule

• 1980, May: The Quebec independence referendum rejected secession from Canada. It was the first referendum in the province of Quebec on the place of Quebec within Canada and whether Quebec should pursue a path toward sovereignty. PM Pierre Trudeau attacked the “Yes” campaign for not asking a clear question, and stated that a “Yes” vote was a dead end, given that the rest of Canada was not bound by the question and that it was too vague to pursue independence if negotiations were refused. He then stated that he would interpret a vote for the “No” as a mandate to renew federalism and change the constitution. The proposal to pursue secession was defeated by a 59.56% “No” to 40.4% “Yes” margin. A second referendum was held in 1995, also rejected pursuing secession, albeit by a much smaller margin (50.58% “No” to 49.42% “Yes”) (See “1982, April” and “1995, Oct”)

• 1980, May: An eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state has often been declared the most disastrous volcanic eruption in US history. It destroyed 300 kms of roads. Hundreds of square miles were reduced to wasteland, causing over $1 billion in damage (equivalent to $3.6 billion in 2021); 57 people were killed plus thousands of animals

• 1980, June: CNN was the first TV channel to provide 24-hour news coverage and the first all-news TV channel in the US, moving TV toward more sensationalism. Traditional values of verification, proportion, relevance, depth, and quality of interpretation have given way to entertainment and opinion. The O. J. Simpson murder case in 1994 and 1995 created the 24-hour news cycle and ushered in the era of cable news. This was a contrast with the day-by-day pace of the news cycle of printed daily newspapers. A high premium on faster reporting saw a further increase with the advent of online news. As of February 2023, CNN has 80 million television households as subscribers in the US. It is ranked third in viewership among cable news networks, behind Fox News and MSNBC

• 1980, Sept-1988, Aug: The Iran–Iraq War began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran and was a disaster for Saddam Hussein and marked the beginning of the end of his power. It lasted for almost eight years, until the acceptance by both sides of a UN resolution. Iraq’s primary rationale for the attack against Iran cited the need to prevent Ruhollah Khomeini – who had spearheaded Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 – from exporting the new Iranian ideology to Iraq. Saddam also feared that Iran, a theocratic state with a population predominantly composed of Shia Muslims, would exploit sectarian tensions in Iraq by rallying Iraq’s Shia majority against the Ba’athist government, which was officially secular and dominated by Sunni Muslims (See “1988, April”)

• 1980, Oct: The misdirectedNational Energy Program was introduced by the Canadian federal Liberal government of PM Pierre Trudeau (and Energy Minister Marc Lalonde and Finance Minister Allan MacEachen). The NEP was considered by Albertans to be among the most unfair federal policies ever implemented. It indeed was misdirected and attempted to control consumer prices within Canada, taxing provincial export revenues, nationalizing petroleum company assets, discriminating against foreign firms and redirecting energy exploration and development from Alberta to second-grade federal Arctic lands. Money left Canada in a hurry. Albertans viewed the NEP as a detrimental intrusion by the federal government into the province’s affairs. It provided much of the fuel behind the rise of the Reform and Canadian Alliance parties, then becoming the Conservative party. (The NEP, which raised the price of fuel in the West and coincided with a hike in provincial gas taxes in Ontario and Quebec, made the retail price of gasoline in Canada become noticeably higher than that of the US, a trend that has continued ever since.) The Conservatives under Brian Mulroney reversed all, shortly after they assumed power in 1984; full deregulation of oil prices resumed and market forces of international and local supply and demand were allowed to determine prices (See “1968, June” and “1970, Oct”)

• 1981, Jan: Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the US, elevating the antistatism that had long characterized New Right grassroots activism to the White House itself. In his inaugural address about the nation’s ongoing economic problems, he said “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” He took 44 states beating Democrat Jimmy Carter handily, whose rescue mission for the American hostages in Iran failed. It was a crushing defeat for liberalism and opened the gates to a conservative renaissance. (Carter won in 1976 as a counter to the darkness of the Richard Nixon years.) Reagan implemented “Reaganomics“, which promoted economic deregulation. He cut taxes, increased defence spending, negotiated a nuclear arms reduction agreement with the Soviets and is credited with helping to bring a quicker end to the Cold War, although he did escalate an arms race with the Soviet Union. Some argue that the result was a widening inequality, a shrinking middle class, and stalled mobility. Republicans ruled for the next 12 years.  (In 1984, Reagan was reelected in a landslide.)

• 1981: Start of modern nanotechnology; made possible through development of the scanning microscope that could “see” individual atoms

• 1981, May: Bobby Sands, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), died on a hunger strike while incarcerated at Maze prison in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The death of Sands resulted in a new surge of IRA activity and an immediate escalation in the Troubles, with the group obtaining many more members and increasing its fund-raising capability. Both nationalists and unionists began to harden their attitudes and move towards political extremes

• 1981, June: The AIDS epidemic officially begins. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported unusual clusters of a type of pneumonia in 5 homosexual men in Los Angeles. In 1983 the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was identified as the infection agent responsible for AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). An estimated 40 million deaths have since occurred 

• 1981, Aug: IBM launched its personal computer. It was priced at $1565 – for a bulky computer, a big-box monitor, a keyboard, a printer and two diskette drives. It had a small Intel chip inside. A young programmer, Bill Gates, was contracted to write software for its operating system (See “1983, Jan” and “1984, Jan”)

• 1981, Oct: Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Palestinian Islamist paramilitary organization, was formed. It is a hard-line organization that focuses more on armed struggle against Israel and less on engaging with the Palestinian population. It rejects Israel right to exist and a two-state solution, as does its primary backer, Iran. The group’s goal is to establish an Islamic state in all the territory of historic Palestine, which includes modern Israel. Hamas, the larger and more popular Islamic militant group that controls the Palestinian coastal enclave of Gaza, sometimes acts in coordination with Islamic Jihad and at other times acts to restrain it. Hamas’s political wing bears responsibility for Gaza’s more than two million mostly poor residents, so it has very different interests

• 1981, Oct: Hosni Mubarak came to power in Egypt with a mandate for cautious change. (He was Anwar Sadat’s handpicked vice president.) The ups and downs of Egyptian politics since are too many to capture, except to state that he launched a campaign against Islamic fundamentalists, especially the Islamic Group, which was responsible for a 1997 attack at Luxor that killed foreign tourists. In 1995 he escaped an assassination attempt. In 2011 thousands of protesters – angered by repression, corruption, and poverty in Egypt – took to the streets, calling for Mubarak to step down as president, which he eventually did. In 2012 an Egyptian court found Mubarak guilty of complicity in the deaths of demonstrators and sentenced him to life in prison. In 2014 a court dismissed the charges. He died in 2020

• 1981, Nov: American cruise missiles delivered to the UK. Over a five-year period, 464 cruise and 108 Pershing II missiles were deployed in five NATO countries as a counter to the Soviet Union’s SS20 missiles. Each nuclear warhead of the Tomahawk cruise missiles, is 16 times more powerful than the bomb exploded at Hiroshima

• 1981, Dec: Martial law declared in Poland in an attempt to counter political opposition, in particular the Solidarity movement, a Polish trade-movement representing one-third of the country’s working-age population. (Solidarity’s leader Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and the union is widely recognized as having played a central role in the end of Communist rule in Poland.) While the tanks were Polish, the order to deploy them came from Moscow. Martial law in Poland was formally lifted in July 1983, though many heightened controls on civil liberties and political life, as well as food rationing, remained in the country throughout the mid-to-late 1980s. As a consequence of economic hardship and political repression, an exodus of Poles saw 700,000 emigrate to the West between 1981 and 1989 

• Early 1980s: Boom of the Video Cassette Recording (VCR) market. It was started by Phillips developing the format in 1970. By the 1980s 30% of UK had a VCR and by the end of the decade, over half. This was a culturally significant development in communist countries where they were banned, but everyone wanted one to see the western society operating. Then around the late 1990s DVDs (the digital video disc) took over

• 1982, Jan: The breakup of the Bell System resulted in the creation of seven independent companies that were formed from the original twenty-two AT&T-controlled members of the System. AT&T Corporation would relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided local telephone service in the US. This effectively took the monopoly that was the Bell System and split it into entirely separate companies that would continue to provide telephone service. AT&T would continue to be a provider of long-distance service, while the now-independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), nicknamed the “Baby Bells”, would provide local service, and would no longer be directly supplied with equipment from AT&T subsidiary Western Electric (See “1911, May”)

• 1982, Feb: David Letterman started as host of the longest-serving late night talk show in American television history. He hosted 6,080 episodes (from 1982 to 1993) of Late Night and Late Show, surpassing his friend and mentor Johnny Carson. The show was seen as edgy and unpredictable, and soon developed a cult following (particularly among college students). Letterman’s reputation as an acerbic interviewer was borne out in verbal sparring matches. Letterman credits Carson as the person who influenced his career the most

• 1982, April: Falkland Islands captured by Argentina. This 10 week undeclared war between Argentina and the UK was over two British dependent territories in the South Atlantic – the Falkland Islands and South Georgia plus the South Sandwich Islands, territories that have been Crown colonies since 1841. Subsequently in June, Argentina forces surrendered to the British. The unfavourable outcome prompted large protests against the ruling Argentine military government, hastening its downfall and the democratization of the country (See “1983, Oct”)

• 1982, April: Canada “patriated” its Constitution and updated it with a new amending formula and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Quebec (under its premier René Lévesque) did not sign on to the “Constitution Act” (See “1931, Dec”, “1980, May” and “1987, April”)

• 1982, June: The 1982 Lebanon War, dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee by the Israeli government, and known in Lebanon as “the invasion”. After attacking the PLO – as well as Syrian, leftist, and Muslim Lebanese forces – the Israeli military occupied southern Lebanon, eventually surrounding the PLO and elements of the Syrian Army. Israeli forces then withdrew from most of Lebanon. The resulting Lebanese Civil War would continue until 1990, at which point Syria had established complete dominance over Lebanon (See “2023, Oct”)

• 1982, Oct: Laurie Skreslet is the first Canadian to summit Mount Everest alone with two Sherpas

• 1982, Nov: Yuri Andropov was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) after Leonid Brezhnev’s death, the first former head of the KGB to become General Secretary. For two long years he ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist (See “1974, Oct”)

• 1983, Jan: Time magazine placed not a person, but a “Machine of the Year” on the cover of its Jan, 31, 1983, issue: the computer. The “Machine of the Year” designation came at a time when PC sales were doubling each year: going from 724,000 in 1980 to 1.4 million in 1981 to almost 3 million in 1982. As the publisher presciently wrote: “Several human candidates might have represented 1982, but none symbolized the past year more richly, or will be viewed by history as more significant, than a machine: the computer.” (See “1981, Aug” and “1984, Jan”)

• 1983, Feb: The series finale of the TV series M*A*S*H. Called ”Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”, the episode’s plot chronicles the final days of the Korean War at the 4077th MASH. Closing out the series’ 11th season, it drew 123 million viewers. The episode surpassed the single-episode ratings record that had been set by the Dallas episode that resolved the “Who Shot J.R.?” Cliffhanger

• 1983, March: President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” and “Star Wars” speeches. Reagan refers to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and warns against “appeasement” and “the so-called nuclear freeze solutions proposed by some.” In an address two weeks later he announces a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to create a space-based ballistic missile shield that could protect against a Soviet nuclear attack. SDI seemed to mark a major shift in a US posture that had so far embraced the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, to maintain strategic stability. Critics say that the SDI, if technologically viable, would run afoul of the ABM treaty. Meanwhile, the Soviet military grows increasingly wary of a widening technological gap with the West

• 1983, July: The coldest temperature ever recorded on the earth was at a Russian research station – Vostok Station, Antarctica, at 128.6 degrees F

• 1983 July: The Access to Information Act was introduced in Canada, enshrining into law the principle that public information belongs to the public. It allows citizens to demand records from federal bodies. The act permits Canadians to retrieve information from government files, establishes what information could be accessed, and mandates timelines for response. This is enforced by the Information Commissioner of Canada. Around the world freedom of information laws allow access by the general public to data held by national governments and, where applicable, by state and local governments. The emergence of freedom of information legislation was a response to increasing dissatisfaction with the secrecy surrounding government policy development and decision making. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 has a target to ensure public access to information and the protection of fundamental freedoms as a means to ensure accountable, inclusive and just institutions

• 1983, Sept: A Korean Air Lines plane was shot down by a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor over Soviet prohibited airspace. The Boeing 747 airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul, but owing to a navigational mistake made by the crew, the airliner drifted from its original planned route and flew through Soviet prohibited airspace. The Soviet Air Force treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding US spy plane, and destroyed it with air-to air missiles, after firing warning shots. The Korean airliner eventually crashed into the sea west of Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including a US representative. The Soviet Union found the wreckage under the sea two weeks later and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret by the Soviet authorities until 1992, after the country’s collapse. As a result of the incident, president Reagan issued a directive making American satellite-based radio navigation GPS freely available for civilian use (See “1973”)

• 1983, Oct: Return of constitutional rule in Argentina when the dictatorship, started under Juan Perón in 1946, and continued by the military in 1976, collapsed as a result of Argentina’s humiliating defeat in the 1982 Falkland Islands war. One of the world’s first truth commissions and empowered courts tried the military’s top brass (See “1982, April”)

• 1983, Oct: Two truck bombs struck buildings in Beirut, Lebanon, housing American and French service members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon (MNF), a military peacekeeping operation during the Lebanese Civil War. This was the deadliest single-day death toll for the US Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima in WWII. The attack killed 307 people: 241 US and 58 French military personnel, six civilians, and two attackers. Some analysis highlights the role of Hezbollah and Iran, calling it “an Iranian operation from top to bottom”. The attacks eventually led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, where they had been stationed following the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) withdrawal in the aftermath of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon 

• 1983: The GNU Project assisted in open source software and open licence. Under a GNU General Public Licence open source software and computer code can be freely used, changed, and shared by anyone. The underlying principle, that of removing the obstacles to co-operation imposed by the owners of proprietary software, has spread into different fields (new drugs; Wikipedia, etc.) 

• 1984, Jan: The Apple Macintosh personal computer went on sale. At a list price of US$2,495 it was all in one: a processor and black-and-white nine-inch screen built into one portable beige case about the size of a large backpack. Later rebranded as the Macintosh 128K, it featured a floppy disk drive, a radical graphical user interface, used a standard-equipment mouse and by todays standards was glacially slow with almost no memory. But practically anyone could use it and it launched an era of continuous invention and development of powerful, personal, easy-to-use computers. It was introduced by a US$1.5 million TV commercial, “1984” and aired during Super Bowl XVIII, and is now considered a “watershed event” and a “masterpiece”. The ad was called “more successful than the Mac itself.” ”1984” used an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by a Picasso-style picture of the computer on her white tank top) as a means of saving humanity from the “conformity” of IBM’s attempts to dominate the computer industry. The ad alludes to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised “Big Brother.” (See “1981, Aug” and “1983, Jan”)

• 1984, June: Cirque du Soleil was born in Quebec, Canada. Using special effects such as light and sound, prompts, colourful and unique costumes different in every show, while traveling the world. Cirque du Soleil expanded rapidly through the 1990s and 2000s, growing from one production to dozens of shows in over 300 cities on six continents. The company employed 4,900 people from 50 countries and generated an annual revenue of approximately US$1 billion in 2017. The multiple permanent Las Vegas shows alone played to more than 9,000 people a night, 5% of the city’s visitors, adding to the over 100 million people who have seen Cirque du Soleil productions worldwide. In March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic brought the company into a state of financial collapse with a debt of over $1 billion. It has been refinanced and is gradually emerging as an active entity (See “1768”)

• 1984, Aug: IBM is credited with developing the world’s first smartphone – the bulky but rather cutely named Simon. It featured a touchscreen, email capability and a handful of built-in apps, including a calculator and a sketch pad

• 1984, Sept: One of the largest landslide victories in Canadian political history occurred. The Progressive Conservative Party (PC Party), led by Brian Mulroney, defeated the incumbent governing Liberal Party led by Prime Minister John Turner. This was the first election since 1958 in which the PC Party won a majority government. The victory came as a result of Mulroney building a ‘grand coalition’ that comprised social conservatives from the West, Red Tories from the East, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives. Mulroney’s PCs won the largest number of seats in Canadian history (at 211) and won the second-largest percentage of seats in Canadian history (at 74.8%). The election marked the end of the Liberals’ long dominance of federal politics in Quebec, a province which had been the bedrock of Liberal support for almost a century. They would not win a majority of Quebec seats again until three decades later in 2015. The PCs then went on to privatize Air Canada and Petro-Canada and they scrapped the National Energy Policy. As a result of his close relationship with US president Ronald Reagan he executed the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement Agreement, later expanded to include Mexico, which transformed the stagnant Canadian economy of the early 1980s with a boom in exports. He also scrapped the outdated and damaging manufacturers’ sales tax with a growth-friendly replacement: the value-added Goods and Services Tax. Without the revenue from the GST, the balanced federal budgets of the 1990s would not have been possible. The 1993 election was as great a loss as 1984 had been a victory; the PCs were reduced to two seats and would eventually be subsumed into the modern Conservative party (See “1987, Oct”)

• 1984, Sept: The Macdonald Commission (the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada) presented its recommendations to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. (Prime Minister Trudeau had appointed the Commission in 1982; it was chaired by Donald S. Macdonald, a former minister of finance.) It was a historic landmark in Canadian economy policy. The commission’s recommendations reflected three broad themes mainly derived from neoconservative ideology. Firstly, the report suggested for Canada to foster a more flexible economy, which would be capable of adjusting to international and technological change, and it recommended greater reliance on the market mechanisms and a free trade agreement with the US (the signature recommendation; Mulroney quickly acted on this one!) Secondly, the commission recommended various reforms to the welfare state model and emphasized social equity and economic efficiency. Thirdly, the commission recommended the adoption of an elected Senate in order to better represent Canada’s diverse regions (no action taken here). While the report received substantial support from the business community its emphasis on market mechanisms was often criticized by the labour movement, nationalist groups and social activists. (Personal aside: I led the development of Imperial Oil’s response to this Commission.) (See “1987, April”)

• 1984, Dec: The Sino-British Joint Declaration for Hong Kong. This is a treaty between the United Kingdom and China on Hong Kong under Chinese sovereignty to detail the arrangements after the lease of the New Territories (which eventually became the whole of Hong Kong) expired in 1997 

• 1985, March: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and President of the Soviet Union (USSR) with 15 countries and 6 Eastern Bloc satellite nations (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany). His “perestroika” and “glasnost” shook up the country. In Geneva, he and Ronald Reagan embarked on a historic series of arms control talks. There is a debate regarding his legacy: either the restructuring of Russia’s economy and permitting freedoms to reverse decades of disastrous Stalinism or essentially the breakup of a country (See “1982, Nov”)

• 1985, April: Civilian government was restored in Brazil after a 21-year-long military regime was established since the 1964 coup d’état. The transition to democracy occurred with the election of Tancredo Neves, leader of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, an opposition party that had always opposed the military regime. He was the first civilian president to be elected since 1964. In 1989 Brazil held its first elections for president by direct popular ballot since the 1964 coup (See “1964, March”) 

• 1985, May: The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered.Three scientists from the British Antarctic Survey announced in the journal Nature their detection of abnormally low levels of ozone over the South Pole. Within two years, in direct response to the Nature article and corroborating studies, 46 nations signed the Montreal Protocol, pledging to phase out substances known to cause ozone depletion. All 197 members of the United Nations would eventually ratify the treaty

• 1985, July: A serious famine in Ethiopia was relieved by funds raised at the Live Aid concert. Years of drought, civil war, and failed attempts at government control of the grain market in the early 1980s led to a catastrophic famine that threatened hundreds of thousands of lives in Ethiopia. The event was held simultaneously in London (Wembley Stadium) and Philadelphia (JFK Stadium). The event was the most ambitious international satellite TV venture that’s ever been attempted: an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations, watched the live broadcast. An estimated 150 million pounds was raised for famine relief 

• 1985, Oct: Les Misérables (The Miserable Ones) opened in London; it was a blockbuster. The show has never stopped, and is now the world’s longest-running musical. The success of the London production led to a Broadway production. The New York production won eight Tony Awards in 1987. It ran 16 years, making it the third-longest-running Broadway musical. It’s based on Victor Hugo’s novel by the same name. Both follow the lives of several – mostly poor -characters in early 19th-century France

• 1985, Nov: Soviet Garry Kasparov becomes the youngest chess world champion. The 22-year-old beat fellow Soviet Anatoly Karpov, who had held the world title for a decade (See “1972, Sept”)

• 1985, Nov: The Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted, killing more than 25,000 people in Armero, Colombia – a town of 30,000 inhabitants – making it the worst natural disaster in the history of the country

• 1986, Feb: The People Power Revolution in the Philippines led to the departure of President Ferdinand Marcos, the end of his 20-year dictatorship and the restoration of democracy. The opposition movement, led by Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., was gaining momentum despite the government’s efforts to suppress dissent. Aquino’s assassination in 1983, upon his return from exile, further galvanized opposition to the Marcos regime. The mother of Ninoy, Corazon “Cory” Aquino, was sworn in as president February 1986 resulting in the restoration of the freedom of the press, abolition of repressive laws enforced by the previous regime, the adoption of the 1987 Constitution, and the subordination of the military to civilian rule, despite several coup attempts during Aquino’s rule. The revolution was notable for its peaceful and non-violent nature, with millions of people taking to the streets to demand the restoration of democracy and the rule of law 

• 1986: The Iran–Contra scandal in the US. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. (President Jimmy Carter had imposed an arms embargo after Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took 52 Americans hostage.) They hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, a right-wing rebel group, in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by government appropriations had been prohibited by Congress, but the loophole was to use non-appropriated funds

• 1986, April: The world’s worst-ever nuclear accident took place: an explosion at the nuclear facility in Chernobyl, northern Ukraine. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven – the maximum severity – on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated US$68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation. This occurred during the dying days of the Soviet Union. The damage, and the ensuing cover-up, has heightened Ukrainians’ anger towards the Kremlin (See “1979, March” and “2011, March”)

• 1986, April: American air attack on Libya in retaliation for the West Berlin discotheque bombing 10 days earlier, which US President Ronald Reagan blamed on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi 

• 1987, Feb: The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was founded in Taiwan by Morris Chang. It is the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, the world’s largest dedicated independent (“pure play”) semiconductor foundry, and its country’s largest company. It is majority owned by foreign investors, and the government of Taiwan is the largest shareholder. In the same year Huawei Technologies was founded by Zen Zhengfei in Shenzhen, a special economic zone in China. It sells its products and services in more than 170 countries and areas.It overtook Ericsson in 2012 as the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world.In 2020, Huawei surpassed Samsung and Apple in the number of phones shipped worldwide for the first time

• 1987: Production worldwide of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were outlawed in order to cut CFC production and use in half under what became known as the Montreal Protocol. In subsequent years, the protocol was strengthened to require an eventual worldwide phaseout of the production of CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals 

• 1987, April: The Canadian Meech Lake Accord proposed strengthening provincial powers and declaring Quebec a “distinct society” was never put into effect; support for separatism soared in Quebec. One of the then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s greatest disappointments was that the Meech Lake constitutional accord did not go through. The accord’s ratification would have ensured his place in history as a modern-day father of Confederation by renewing the pact between “two founding nations” that had always been at the core of his, and Quebeckers’, vision of Canada. The Meech Lake Accord was supposed to be an agreement between the federal and provincial governments to amend (change) the Constitution. The Accord proposed strengthening provincial powers and declaring Quebec a “distinct society.” The proposed amendments were initially popular and backed by nearly all political leaders. However, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, feminist activists, and Indigenous groups raised concerns about the lack of citizen involvement in the Accord’s drafting and its future effects on Canadian federalism, and support for the Accord began to decline. Changes in government in New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Newfoundland brought ministries to power that declined to accept the Accord. The original accord would not gain acceptance in the Manitoba or Newfoundland legislatures in time for ratification. Many Québécois saw the Accord’s failure in English Canada as a rejection of Quebec. Support for separatism soared in Quebec and led to the 1995 Quebec Referendum (See “1931, Dec” and “1987, Oct”) 

• 1987, May: World No Tobacco Day was created by the Member States of the World Heath Organization (WHO) to draw global attention to the tobacco epidemic and the preventable death and disease it causes. The WHO now offer 11 official global public health campaigns (blood donation; immunization; tuberculosis; malaria; hepatitis; Chagas disease; patient safety; antimicrobial; AIDS)

• 1987: The Fairness Doctrine for holders of US broadcast licenses was repealed. This was formulated in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It required licensed radio and TV broadcasters to present fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues of interest to their communities, including by granting equal airtime to opposing candidates for public office. The FCC decided that the doctrine had a “chilling effect” upon freedom of speech. The demise of this FCC rule has been cited as a contributing factor in the rising level of party polarization in the US 

• 1987, Oct: The Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) was agreed upon. Trade between Canada and the US, which had already been on the rise, increased at an accelerated rate after the agreement was signed. While throughout the 20th century, exports fairly consistently made up about 25% of Canada’s GDP, since 1990 exports have been about 40% of GDP.  After 2000, they reached nearly 50%. The incumbent PM, Brian Mulroney, called an election on the issue and went on to lead his Progressive Conservative Party to a second majority. (Mulroney became the party’s first leader since John A. Macdonald to win a second majority.) The Liberal Party doubled their seat count and experienced a moderate recovery after their 1984 wipeout. The New Democratic Party won the highest number of seats at the time until they would beat that record in 2011. The election was the last won by the Progressive Conservatives until 2011 (See “1878, March”, “1984, Sept”, “1994, Jan” and “2020, July”)

• 1987, Dec: The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by Russia and the US agreeing to eliminate by 1991 their countries’ arsenals of ground-launched, midrange nuclear missiles (ranging from about 300 to 3,400 miles). It’s the first agreement to reduce nuclear arms – as opposed to setting ceilings – and it introduced comprehensive verification measures. A turning point for the negotiations came after Gorbachev, in a shift from his previous posture, agreed to de-link the INF from broader strategic talks, which included Soviet efforts to inhibit US development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In October 2018 President Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from the treaty due to Russian non-compliance; he claimed another reason for the withdrawal was to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, as China was not a signatory to the treaty. Russia then withdrew in response

• 1988, Jan: Themusical Phantom of the Opera opened and became Broadway’s longest-running show and musical. The Broadway production closed in April 2023 after 35 years – the longest running show in Broadway. The musical opened in London’s West End in 1986; this production remains the second longest-running West End musical, after Les Misérables (The Lion King and Cats were number three and four), and the third longest-running West End show overall, after The Mousetrap. Cats started the mega-musical phenomenon, establishing a global market for musical theatre and directing the industry’s focus to big-budget blockbusters, as well as family and tourist-friendly shows (See “1952, Oct”)

• 1988: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established. It is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations. Its job is to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities. The IPCC does not conduct original research. It produces comprehensive assessments on the state of knowledge of climate change. It prepares reports on special topics relevant to climate change. It also produces methodologies. These methodologies help countries estimate their greenhouse gas emissions. Over the course of six assessments the reports reflect the growing evidence for a changing climate. And they show how this is due to human activity (See “1972, June” and 2007, Dec”) 

• 1988, April: Operation Praying Mantiswas the attack by the  US on Iranian naval targets in the Persian Gulf in retaliation for the mining of a US warship four days earlier. Praying Mantis was the largest of the US Navy’s five major surface engagements since WWII. It saw the US Navy’s first exchange of anti-ship missiles with opposing ships, and its only sinking of a major surface combatant since World War II. The attack pressured Iran to agree to a ceasefire with Iraq later that summer, ending the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (See “1980, Sept-1988, Aug”)

• 1988, Aug: The 1988 Nepal earthquake occurred in Nepal near the Indian border and affected much of northern Bihar state. The magnitude 6.9 earthquake killed at least 709 persons and injured thousands

• 1988, Nov: The Palestinian Declaration of Independence formally established the State of Palestine. Yasser Arafat was elected its first president. There was a Palestine National Council (PNC) call for multilateral negotiations on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 242. This call was later termed “the Historic Compromise”, as it implied acceptance of the “two-state solution”, namely that it no longer questioned the legitimacy of the State of Israel 

• 1988, Dec: A terrorist bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. On its way from London to NYC, 259 people were killed. The maker of the bomb, a Libyan intelligence official, was arrested in December 2022 and will finally be put on trial in the US. The operation likely was ordered by Libyan intelligence, led by Col. Muammar Gaddafi 

• 1989, Feb: The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the writer Salman Rushdie. This was sparked by the 1988 publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses”. It centred on the novel’s references to the Satanic Verses of the Quran. This pitted a core Western value of freedom of expression – that no one “should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write” – against the view of some Muslims that non-Muslims should not be free to disparage the “honour of the Prophet” or indirectly criticize Islam through satire – and that religious violence is appropriate in contemporary history in order to defend Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. This fatwa has been called “one of the most significant events in postwar literary history”. This situation has been an unusual moment when literature and politics have merged

• 1989, March: Invention of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer, working at the European Particle Physics Lab (CERN), wrote a paper proposing an information management system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the world wide web. It had three fundamental technologies: 1.) HTML (the publishing format or unique language); 2.) Uniform Resource Identifier or URI (an address unique to every resource), and 3.) HTTP ( a transfer technology which allows the retrieval of linked resources from across the web) (See “1991, Aug”)

• 1989, March: The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, after an oil supertanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company bound for California struck a reef and spilled 10.8 million US gallons of crude oil over the next few days – the second largest oil spill in US history after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume of oil released. The Coast Guard report proposed many recommendations, including that neither Exxon, the State of Alaska, nor the federal government were prepared for a spill of this magnitude. The remaining oil lasted far longer than anticipated and has resulted in more long-term losses of species than had been expected (See “2010, April”)

• 1989, June: Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. These were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. The protests started in April (completely overshadowing the Gorbachev visit that occurred at the same time) and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People’s Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded. Since this time Chinese history has been rewritten; protesters have been recast as rioters and the unrest gradually wiped from history (just as the Falun Gong spiritual movement is being made to disappear)

• 1989, June: Poland became the first country of the Eastern Bloc in which democratically elected representatives gained real power. Not all parliamentary seats were contested, but the resounding victory of the Solidarity opposition, under the charismatic leadership of Lech Wałęsa (a shipyard electrician by trade) in the freely contested races paved the way to the end of communist rule in the country. Wałęsa became the first democratically elected president of Poland since 1926 and the first-ever Polish president elected by popular vote (See “2023, Nov”)

• 1989, Nov: The Iron Curtain fell. Demolition of the Berlin Wall commenced. (I have a chunk of it I purchased a few months later in Berlin.)  This was less than a week after half a million people took to the streets of East Berlin demanding democracy. The world will have to thank Mikhail Gorbachev (then the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) for that. If it had not been for him, the end of the Soviet empire could have been a drawn-out and bloody affair. Unlike his predecessors, who had used force to quash anti-communist movements in Hungary (1956) and the former Czechoslovakia (1968), Gorbachev insisted on “the sovereign right of each people to choose their own social system at their own discretion.” The Soviet Union collapsed two years later, in no small part because of the fall of the Wall. The reunification of Germany took place October 1990 (See “1949, May” and “1961, Aug”)

• 1989, Nov: The Asia-Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) was established. From its original 12 members (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and the US) nine others have been added (Chile, China, People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Russian Federation, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan). APEC’s foundational goals are free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific. This forum of 21 Asian-Pacific economies represents 2.9 billion people and make up over 60% of global GDP. The US is host for 2023

• 1989, Nov: The Velvet Revolution was a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia. The result was the end of 41 years of one-party rule and the subsequent dismantling of the command economy and conversion to a parliamentary republic. This was eight days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Playwright Vaclav Havel became President of the country and six months later democratic elections were held (and 2 1/2 years later Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two countries, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic representing the two major ethnicities.) Czechoslovakia was created in 1918 when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. Between 1939 and 1945, the state ceased to exist, as Slovakia proclaimed its independence and Carpathian Ruthenia became part of Hungary, while the remainder of the Czech Lands, the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed. After WWII, Czechoslovakia was reestablished under its pre-1938 borders (with the exception of Carpathian Ruthenia, which became part of the Ukranian SSR (a republic of the Soviet Union). The Communist Party seized power in a coup in 1948 and it was part of the Soviet Bloc with a planned economy (See “1968, Aug”)

• 1989, Dec: Romania overthrew its communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. He perceived the anti-government protesters as a political threat and ordered military forces to open fire, causing many deaths and injuries. The revelation that Ceaușescu was responsible resulted in a massive spread of rioting and civil unrest across the country. The demonstrations, which reached the capital Bucharest, became known as the Romanian Revolution – the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the course of the Revolutions of 1989 

• 1990, Feb: “A promise that NATO would not expand to the east if Russia accepted Germany’s unification” is a claim made by Vladimir Putin that the US secretary of state James Baker, made in a discussion with the then Soviet leader, Gorbachev. Gorbachev has since been quoted (in October 2014): “The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a singe Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”

• 1990, Feb: South African President Frederik de Klerk released Nelson Mandela and lifted a 30-year ban on the African National Congress. Mandela spent the first 18 of his 27 years in jail at the brutal Robben Island Prison. Confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing, he was forced to do hard labor in a quarry. He could write and receive a letter once every six months, and once a year he was allowed to meet with a visitor for 30 minutes (See “1964, April” and “1994, May”)

• 1990, Feb: Violeta Barrios de Chamorro beat Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua’s presidential election. During her six years in power, she enacted a number of peace reforms, including disbanding the US-backed Contras. But her legacy has not endured. The country’s political turmoil is a reflection of fierce international turmoil and conflict with the FSLN (a leftist collection of political parties receiving large amounts of aid from the Soviet Union) and the Contras (a rightist collection of counter-revolutionary groups) receiving aid from the US. Ortega returned to power in 2006, and has since been reelected to four consecutive terms as president, throughout which he has consolidated an iron rule over the country. Many intellectuals and critics of the regime have since fled (See “1979, June”)

• 1990, March: Lithuania declared independence. It was the first of the 15 Soviet republics to declare independence, with the rest following in 21 months, concluding with Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991. These events (part of the broader process dubbed the “parade of sovereignties”) led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania or Act of 11 March was an independence declaration by Lithuania. In the 18th century, Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Council of Lithuania proclaimed independence on February 1918. Lithuania enjoyed independence for two decades. In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. The Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) were assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence and subsequently were occupied in June 1940 and converted into soviet socialist republics (See “1939, Aug” and “1991, Dec”) 

• 1990, March: Namibia becomes a free country after elections were held for the Constituent Assembly of Namibia. The elections were facilitated by the UN, after the withdrawal of South African troops from South West Africa (which is present day Namibia)

• 1990, April: The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit 600 kms above earth. Hubble’s orbit outside the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere allows it to capture extremely high-resolution images with substantially lower background light than ground-based telescopes. It initially went through repairs to its primary mirror which had been ground incorrectly, resulting in spherical aberration. The optics were corrected to their intended quality by a servicing mission in 1993, using the Canadarm. It is repeatedly cited as the most valuable scientific instrument ever made, allowing for exploration of the outer regions of the universe to a degree that astronomers had never dreamed possible (See “1975”)

• 1990, May: Restoration of Independence of the Republic of Latvia. They resolved that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940 were illegal. It also asserted that the heavily rigged 1940 elections were illegal and unconstitutional, and that the request to join the Soviet Union on July 1940 were ipso facto void (See “1939, Aug” and “1990, March”)

• 1990, June: The first multi-party elections since 1939 were held in Bulgaria. In November the Grand National Assembly voted to change the country’s name to the Republic of Bulgaria and removed the Communist star emblem from the national flag

• 1990, Aug-1991, Feb: The First Gulf War (or Persian Gulf War): Saddam Hussein of Iraq tried to seize Kuwait because he wanted their oil and to ease his debt (See “2003, March-April”)

• 1990, Aug-Dec:Operation Desert Shield of the First Gulf War. On August 2, Iraqi armoured divisions invaded Kuwait. The diplomatic response to the invasion was swift. On Aug 7 the first U.S. troops were sent to Saudi Arabia. On August 10, 12 of the 21 Arab League countries passed a resolution condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and endorsing an Aug 6 UN resolution which imposed a ban on all trade with Iraq and called on UN member countries to protect the assets of the legitimate government of Kuwait. Among those Arab states sympathetic to Iraq were Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, and Algeria as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The key supporters of Kuwait, apart from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, were Egypt and Syria. Saddam seemed poised to continue his military push into Saudi Arabia. Conquering Saudi Arabia would have given him control of more than 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves as well as two of the holiest sites in the Islamic world, Mecca and Medina. During the occupation by Iraq of Kuwait, Iraqi troops began a systematic campaign of pillage, rape, torture, murder, and theft of Kuwait’s economic assets. On paper, the Iraqi military looked formidable. Its army was the fifth largest in the world. Over the following months the US military carried out its largest overseas deployment since WWII. By mid-November the US had more than 240,000 troops in the Gulf and another 200,000 on the way, and the UK had sent more than 25,000, Egypt 20,000, and France 5,500. Some 25 other countries, including Canada, Syria, Bangladesh and Morocco, had committed troops and weapons to the military buildup that was designated Operation Desert Shield (See “2003, March-April”)

• 1990, Sept: The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed setting out how NATO troops could operate in the territory of the former East Germany. It allowed foreign-stationed NATO troops to cross the old cold war line marked by East Germany at the discretion of the German government. The agreement was contained in a signed addendum. NATO’s commitment to protect, enshrined in article 5, had for the first time moved east into former Russian-held territory. The last Russian troops left Germany by August 1994

• 1990, Sept: The first search engine called Archie is created. It was developed by three researchers at McGill University in Montreal. It was limited in its search to their FTP network, and soon the need for a web search engine was needed 

• 1990, Oct: The Human Genome Project (HGP) launched and completed in April 2003.It is one of the greatest scientific feats in history. The project was a voyage of biological discovery led by an international group of researchers looking to comprehensively study all of the DNA (known as a genome) of a select set of organisms. The Human Genome Project’s signature accomplishment – generating the first sequence of the human genome – provided fundamental information about the human blueprint, which has since accelerated the study of human biology and improved the practice of medicine 

• 1990, Nov: The Paris Charter, adopted by a summit meeting in Paris, was the peace conference of the Cold War: Perestroika had ultimately put an end to the ideological and political division of the Iron Curtain. Pluralist democracy and market economy were together with international law and multilateralism seen as the victors. Most European governments in addition to those of Canada, the US and the Soviet Union, were present. The charter was established on the foundation of the Helsinki Accords (1975) and was further amended in the 1999 Charter for European Security. Together, these documents form the agreed basis for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. However, not all OSCE member countries have signed the treaty

• 1990: The rise in awareness of the impact of carbon dioxide on global temperatures. The First Assessment Report (FAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that it is likely that carbon dioxide, emitted by the burning of fossil fuels, was raising global temperatures. In 2001, it reported new and stronger evidence that humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gasses were causing global warming

• 1990s (early): Inexpensive CO detectors introduced commercially to warn of incomplete in-house combustion. This is key in cold climates when wood stoves might be a prime source of heat

• 1990s (early): Online banking is born. Originally called “home banking”. Seemingly overnight, banks began to put up their own websites, offering banking over the internet 

• 1991, Jan/Feb: Operation Desert Storm of the First Gulf War. On November 29, 1990, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force. This was the first UN authorization of the use of force since 1950, when the Security Council approved military action against North Korea after its unprovoked attack on South Korea. The US-led UN authorized coalition of 35 nations against Iraq in response to the Iraqi invasion was the first major international crisis of the post-Cold War era. This eventually resulted in the forced expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait (and the Iraqis setting 600 Kuwaiti oil wells on fire during their retreat –  a despicable reaction). The UN dismantles Hussein’s nuclear weapons program.He believed, wrongly, that Iraq would be permitted by other states to swallow up Kuwait. The US military continue a strong presence in Kuwait. A separate outcome of the the Gulf War was the CNN coverage: meticulous planning, bravery and 24 hours of extraordinary coverage made CNN the network to watch. It was nicknamed “Video Game War” as images were broadcast from cameras onboard American bombers (See ”2003, March-May”)

• 1991, March: The Soviet army began leaving Hungary with the last troops gone by June (See ”1956, Nov”)

• 1991, March: The Air Quality Agreement (the “Acid Rain Treaty”) was signed between the US and Canada. Both countries agreed to reduce emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, the primary precursors to acid rain, and to work together on acid rain-related scientific and technical cooperation. The Ontario government went beyond regulation and adopted a policy of shutting down all coal-fired generating plants. The first one closed in 2005, the last in 2014

• 1991, April: Eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The large stratospheric injection resulted in a volcanic winter and a reduction in the normal amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by roughly 10%. This led to a decrease in Northern Hemisphere average temperatures of about .6 degrees C. It expelled ten times as much material as Mount St. Helens

• 1991, July: The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), a bilateral arms control treaty between the US and the Soviet Union, was signed. The result of the agreement was the first significant reduction in the number of strategic nuclear weapons in both the US and the Soviet stockpiles. This plus its successor, known as New START, capped the number of nuclear warheads each side could possess – most recently at 1,550 – and established a verification process that allowed US and Russian monitors to visit the other country’s nuclear facilities up to 18 times a year. (Note: on Feb 21, 2023 Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Russia will “put the agreement on hold” stating that it was “absurd” for the US to be allowed to inspect Russian nuclear facilities at a time when the US and its allies were sending military support to Ukraine.) (See “1972, May”, ”2010, Apr” and  “2021, Feb”) 

• 1991, Aug: Estonia voted to confirm its Restoration of Independence, i.e. continuing with the Republic of Estonia that was established in 1918 and occupied in 1940 (as opposed to declaring independence as a new Republic). This meant that the occupation of the Republic of Estonia by the Soviet Union on 17 June 1940 did not de jure interrupt the existence of the Republic of Estonia. In May 1990 they adopted a law invalidating the name “Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic”

• 1991, Aug: A referendum held in Ukraine that led it to become an independent modern nation-state, effectively ending the USSR. (In July 1990 Ukraine’s newly elected parliament adopted its Declaration of State Sovereignty.) Ukraine was the second-most powerful republic in the Soviet Union both economically and politically (behind Russia), and its secession ended any realistic chance of Gorbachev keeping the USSR together. On the same day, a presidential election took place. In the month up to the presidential election, all six candidates campaigned across Ukraine in favour of independence from the Soviet Union, and a “Yes” vote in the referendum. (55% of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine voted for independence.) Leonid Kravchuk, the parliament chairman and de facto head of state, was elected to serve as the first President of Ukraine. So the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) emerged as the present-day independent state of Ukraine although the modified Soviet era constitution remained in use until the adoption of the modern Ukrainian constitution in June 1996 (See “1989, Nov” and “1991, Dec”) 

• 1991, Aug: The first-ever website was published by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee. He is an English computer scientist and a research fellow at Oxford and a professor emeritus at MIT. He developed the first web server, the first web browser, and a document formatting protocol, called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This was the beginning of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. Fittingly, the site he published was about the World Wide Web (WWW) project, describing the Web and how to use it. (The Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email.) (See “1989, March”)

• 1991, Oct: The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty was signed. It designates Antarctica as a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science”. It prohibits all activities relating to Antarctic mineral resources, except for scientific research

• 1990, Dec: Canada was the first Group of Seven and Group of 20 country to recognize Ukraine as a sovereign country. Canada is home to the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, behind Russia. Today, there are roughly 1.36 million Ukrainian Canadians, comprising nearly 4% of the population and making them the largest Slavic group in Canada

• 1991, Dec: The break-up of the Soviet Union.It disintegrated into 15 separate countries, bringing an end to the Cold War and reformulating political, economic and military alliances all over the globe. The outcome, or the Belavezha Accords, put an end to the USSR, replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Gorbachev declared his office extinct on Dec 25, 1991 and the country splintered into its constituent republics and handed over its attributes – including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes – to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. It was a humble end for a 69-year strong nuclear empire. (Ukraine suddenly became home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal.) What followed was a decade of chaotic privatization and the rise of oligarchs. Putin has called this the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century (See “1947, Oct”)

• 1991, Dec: The Russian KGB was officially dissolved and was later succeeded by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and what would later become the Federal Security Service (FSB), the principal security agency of Russia. Information gathering, disinformation, infiltration, double agents, sabotage, defectors and moles, inserting malware, bribery, etc. all became part of their lingo. In 2006 the FSB was given the legal power to engage in targeted killing of terrorism suspects overseas if ordered by the president

• 1991, Dec: Boris Yeltsin becomes he first elected president of the Russian Federal Republic within the USSR. Yeltsin, the first president of the independent Russian state was, in fact, an inherent part of the previous communist regime. He rose to power as Gorbachev’s protegee in the late 1980s and emerged as a leader of the wave of Russian anti-communist nationalism that picked up in the early 1990s. What resulted was radical capitalist shock therapy (withdrawal of price controls; mass privatization of state assets; printing of more rubles resulting in hyperinflation). On top of all that, Yeltsin was tormented by depression and was a serious alcoholic (See “1996, June”)

• 1992, Jan: Yeltsin proved incapable of managing the promised transformation of Russia to a capitalist economy. In January the departure from the state regulated economy began, triggering hyperinflation that swept away lifelong savings, with prices of everyday commodities skyrocketing by 350% within the first month of the reform. By 1993, the country was in a deep depression, and the ruble’s worth plummeted. Living standards deteriorated so radically that between 1992 and 1994, male life expectancy in Russia dropped from 62 to 57 years, a decrease that has been attributed to socio-economic stress and resulting alcohol abuse and suicide

• 1992, Feb: The Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty) was signed. Itis the foundation treaty of the European Union (EU). It leads to provisions for a shared European citizenship, for the eventual introduction of a single currency, and (with less precision) for common foreign and security policies

• 1992, early: The Japanese real estate and stock market bubble from 1986 to 1991 burst. The Nikkei average of Japanese stock prices had quintupled. When the banking system cratered Japan was consigned to a “lost decade” of frustration and humiliation. In fact the “lost decade” became the ”lost 20 years” since Japanese GDP to 2017 was only 2.6% higher than it had been in 1997 

• 1992: Francis Fukuyama published his famous book “The End of History and the Last Man”. Hecharacterized the impending collapse of the Soviet Union as part of “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and declared liberal democracy to be the “final form of human government.” He stated that the endless cycles and conflicts of the ages were done: We were all going to embrace the rules-based international order that sprang from WWII. For a while, it did look that way. His assertion that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the “end of history” has since been upended

• 1992, March: The Treaty on Open Skies signed by the US, the newly independent Russia, and twenty-five other countries. It allows members to conduct scheduled reconnaissance flights over another’s territory. Note: In November 2020, the US withdrew from this treaty. As its rationale, the Trump administration alleges that Russia has been abusing the agreement for years. Many NATO members express regret at the US withdrawal from Open Skies, which they say is useful despite Russia’s noncompliance

• 1992, April-1995, Dec: The Bosnian War: an armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In April 1992, the government of Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, so the war was part of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The creation of an independent Bosnian nation that would have a Bosniak majority was opposed by Bosnian Serbs, who launched a military campaign to secure coveted territory and “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim civilian population. It took more than 100,000 deaths (mostly of Bosnians) and a belated US intervention for the slaughter to end in 1995. At the time, the war was the most devastating conflict in Europe since the end of WWII 

• 1992, May: Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine sign the Lisbon Protocol to the START agreement, committing the newly independent states to transferring the former Soviet nuclear arsenals to Russia and to joining the NPT as nonnuclear-weapons states. The US government provides billions of dollars to fund the denuclearization process through its Cooperative Threat Reduction program. The weapons handover is completed by the end of 1996

• 1992, June: Rio Earth Summit, or the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), was a major UN conference held in Rio de Janeiro. It had a big youth component; Severn Suzuki (daughter of David) gave a very passionate speech (See “1994, March”, “2015, Dec” and “2023, Dec”)

• 1992, July: The Canadian government announced a moratorium on cod fishing in the North Atlantic putting 19,000 workers in immediate need of financial assistance. This ended nearly five centuries of cod fishing in Newfoundland and Labrador. The aim was to help restore cod stocks that had been deleted due to overfishing. Today, the cod population remains too low to support a full-scale fishery, so the ban is still largely in place

• 1992, Aug: The Ruby Ridge siege where US militarized state violence helped to inspire the growth of militias. The death of Vicky Weaver who was killed by an federal sniper, and was the wife of Randy Weaver who US Marshals were trying to arrest on federal firearms charges, was used as a symbol by the white power movement in the US 

• 1993, March: The Storm of the Century was felt from Canada all the way to Central America. It was strongest along the eastern US, which was subjected to three days of blizzard conditions and heavy snowfall, as well as rough seas, coastal flooding, tornadoes, and bitterly cold temperatures. By the time it had dissipated, the Great Blizzard of ’93 (as it was also known) had caused about $5.5 billion in damages (the equivalent of about $11.6 billion today), making it one of the most costly weather events of the 20th century

• 1993, April: The Waco, Texas massacre ended a 51 day FBI siege of a compound that belonged to the religious cult Branch Davidians led by cult leader David Koresh. The incident began with authorities commencing a search and arrest warrant on the ranch. An intense gunfight erupted, resulting in the deaths of four agents and six Branch Davidians. Subsequently a fire ensued resulting in the deaths of 76 Branch Davidians, including 25 children, two pregnant women and Koresh (See “1995, April”)

• 1993, Aug: Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in talks with Lech Walensa, the Polish leader, conceded Poland’s right to join NATO and did not perceive it as a threat. In December 1997, Yeltsin had described NATO expansion as a threat to Russia.
  
• 1993, Nov: The Oslo Accords were aimed at fulfilling the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. It included both the recognition of Israel by the PLO and the recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and as a partner in bilateral negotiations

• 1993, Dec: The first global positioning system (GPS) was fully operational. It is a satellite-based radio-navigation system owned by the US government and operated by the US Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that provides geolocation and time information to a GPS receiver anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites

• 1994, Jan: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force that created a trilateral trade bloc in between Canada, the US and Mexico. Tariffs were eliminated progressively and all duties and quantitative restrictions, with the exception of those on a limited number of agricultural products traded with Canada, were eliminated by 2008. It superseded the 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and formed one of the largest trade blocs in the world by gross domestic product (See “1987, Oct” and “ 2020, July”)

• 1994, March: TheUnited Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) became effective. (It was signed June 1992 by 154 states at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED, informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro). It is an international treaty among countries to combat “dangerous human interference with the climate system”, in part by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere (See “1992, June” and “2023, Dec”)

• 1994:amazon.com went live as a virtual bookstore. A year earlier, former Wall Street executive Jeff Bezos started the company in his Bellevue, Washington, garage. At the time it was called Cadabra, but that had an unfortunate similarity to the word “cadaver” so he switched it to Amazon. Now Amazon sells pretty much everything, and Bezos is one of the richest people in the world

• 1994, April:  The Rwandan genocide commenced. From April to July, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutus (soldiers, police, and militia). (This took place during the 1990-1994 Rwandan Civil War which arose from the long-running dispute between the Hutu and Tutsi groups within the Rwandan population. A 1959-1962 revolution had replaced the Tutsi monarchy with a Hutu-led republic, forcing more than 336,000 Tutsi to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. A group of these refugees in Uganda founded the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front.) The catalyst was the assassination of the Hutu president on 6 April 1994, creating a power vacuum and ending peace accords. Genocidal killings began the following day (led by a rebel group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda – FDLR, founded by extremist ethnic Hutu soldiers who fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo after massacring hundreds of thousands of Tutsis). The most widely accepted estimates are around 500,000 to 662,000 Tutsi deaths. Sexual violence was rife, with an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women raped during the genocide (See “2023, April”)

• 1994, May: Nelson Mandela became the first black head of state in South African history but the country remains troubled. Mandela was as well the first to take office following the dismantling of apartheid and the introduction of constitutional democracy. He lead the African National Congress Party (ANC) and F. W. De Klerk was president. South Africa remains troubled by the reality that while everyone gets the vote, power over the structure of the economy remains dominated by a tiny elite. A strategy called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) was introduced to encourage white-owned companies to transfer shares and board positions to Black people. This was intensified by the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction under Jacob Zuma’s presidency in 2009. The wheels fell off and he was replaced by Cyril Ramaphosa, but he has been disappointing and the ANC will likely lose its parliamentary majority in next year’s election, for the first time since independence. The country remains deeply troubled (See “1964, April” and “1990, Feb”)

• 1994, Nov: The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) came into effect. It is an international agreement that establishes a legal framework for all marine and maritime activities. As of June 2016, 167 countries and the European Union are parties. Originally all waters beyond national boundaries were considered international waters: free to all nations, but belonging to none of them (the mare liberum principle). President Harry Truman in 1945 extended US control to all the natural resources of its continental shelf. By 1967, only 25 nations still used the old three nautical mile limit, while 66 nations had set a 12-nautical-mile (22 km) territorial limitand eight had set a 200-nautical-mile (370 km) limit

• 1994, Nov: A covert attempt by Russian intelligence services to oust the Chechen government by seizing the Chechen capital of Grozny. The attack was conducted by armed formations of the opposition Provisional Council, with the clandestine support of Russian Federation armour and aircraft. The fighting subsided after the first 10 hours, with the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria decisively repelling the assault. The Russian government officially denied military involvement in the operation. The incident led to the large-scale military invasion of the republic that began the next month (See next)

• 1994, Dec-1995, March: The First Battle of Grozny was the Russian Army’s invasion and subsequent conquest of the Chechen capital of Grozny, during the early months of the First Chechen War. The attack, which resulted in the military occupation of the city by the Russian Army and rallied most of the Chechen nation around the government of Dzhokhar Dudayev (See next)

• 1994, Dec-1996, Aug: The First Chechen War (or First Russo-Chechen War), was a struggle for independence waged by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the Russian Federation. This conflict was preceded by the Battle of Grozny. It took two months of heavy fighting before the Russian Army was able to capture Grozny. It concluded as a pyrrhic victory for the Russian federal forces (they destroyed much of the city and killed 20,000 civilians). Their subsequent efforts to establish control over the remaining lowlands and mountainous regions of Chechnya were met with fierce resistance from Chechen guerrillas who often conducted surprise raids. The battle caused enormous destruction and casualties amongst the civilian population and saw the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since the end of WWII. Despite Russia’s considerable military advantages, the recapture of Grozny in 1996 significantly demoralized Russian troops. This development led Boris Yeltsin’s government to announce a ceasefire with the Chechens in 1996 and ultimately culminated in the signing of a peace treaty in 1997. It is estimated that the number of Russian military deaths was as high as 14,000; the number of Chechen military deaths was approximately 3,000-10,000; the number of Chechen civilian deaths was between 30,000 and 100,000 (See “1999, Aug”)

• 1994, Dec: The Budapest Memorandum was signed, obligating Russia and others to respect the sovereignty, independence, and existing borders of Ukraine. Ukraine was persuaded to give up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world in exchange for guarantees for it’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. It prohibited the Russian Federation, the UK and the US from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine (as well as Belarus and Kazakhstan). Ukraine had a weak hand; the country was on the verge of economic collapse plus the US and Russia were allied against it and they faced international isolation if they didn’t sign. Had the Budapest Memorandum provided the guarantees of their country’s territorial integrity that the Ukrainians sought instead of mere assurances, Russia would have met with much greater obstacles to violating Ukraine’s borders, including in Crimea and the Donbas  

• 1994, Dec: Sony launched the PlayStation, a new gaming system, in Japan (and the next year in the US) on CD. By the time it ceased production in 2005, PlayStation One had shipped more than 100 million units

• 1995, Jan: The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established to supervise and liberalize world trade. The WTO is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947 (See “1947, Oct”)

• 1995, April: The Oklahoma City bombing was a US domestic terrorist truck bombing on a government building in Oklahoma City. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history and the height of white power violence in the US. Perpetrated by two anti-government extremists, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed more than one-third of the building. McVeigh was motivated by his dislike for the US federal government and unhappy about its handling of the Ruby Ridge incident in 1992 and the Waco siege in 1993. He was executed by lethal injection in 2001 (See “1993, April”)

• 1995, July: Vietnam rejoins the world; it officially became the seventh member of the Association of Southeast Asian Association of Nations (ASEAN). It has the third largest population and fourth largest area among ASEAN countries

• 1995, July: The Srebrenica massacre: Bosnian-Serb forces killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War. The International Court of Justice upheld the ruling that the massacre of the male inhabitants of the town constituted genocide, a crime under international law. The stories of rape, of killing children, of unbelievable inhumanity are a chilling reminder of what brutality can exist inside man. The massacre became an iconic image of the conflict 

• 1995, Aug: Torrential rains causing devastating floods followed by a period of mass starvation took place in North Korea. The rains led to the the destruction of crop lands and harvests, but also the loss of emergency grain reserves. This period of mass starvation together with a general economic crisis took place from 1995 to 1998. A variety of factors were causes: the loss of Soviet support caused food production and imports to decline rapidly; the government and its centrally planned systems proved too inflexible to effectively curtail the disaster. Estimates of the death toll vary widely. Out of a total population of ~22 million, somewhere between 240,000 and 3,500,000 North Koreans died from starvation or hunger-related illnesses. Foreign aid that offered was derided as “poison candy” and an insult to the country’s “honour and dignity”

• 1995, Sept: Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, PLO leader, signed the Oslo II Accords, also known as the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It was built on the foundations of the Oslo I Accord, formally signed September 1993. This peace process was aimed at achieving a peace treaty based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, and at fulfilling the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. The Oslo process began after secret negotiations in Oslo, Norway, resulting in both the recognition by the PLO of Israel and the recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and as a partner in bilateral negotiations. (Neither side wanted to publicly acknowledge their presence at the talks for fear of generating controversy. Many Israelis considered the PLO a terrorist organization, and thus would have seen the talks as violating the country’s prohibition on negotiating with terrorists. The PLO, meanwhile, from its inception had not formally recognized the legitimacy of Israel, and its supporters would have considered a formal acknowledgement of the Jewish state’s right to exist a non-starter.) (See “1948, May”, “1995, Nov” and “2023, Oct 6”)

• 1995, Oct: Québec voted “no” to separation from Canada. Canada’s 2cd Quebec referendum on Québec sovereignty was settled by a narrow victory for the “No” camp, (narrower than in the 1980 referendum). It featured the largest voter turnout in Quebec’s history (93.52%). The “No” option carried by a margin of 54,288 votes, receiving 50.58% of the votes cast. Jacques Parizeau, who announced his pending resignation as Quebec premier the following day, later stated that he would have quickly proceeded with a unilateral declaration of independence had the result been affirmative and negotiations failed or been refused (See “1980, May”, “1998, Aug” and “2000, June”)

• 1995, Nov: The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, because he signed the Oslo Accords. The assailant was an Israeli law student and ultranationalist who opposed his peace initiative (See “1995, Sept”)

• 1996, Feb: Chess grandmaster Russian Garry Kasparov beat IBMs supercomputer in a six-game chess series. While he lost game 1 (the first time a chess computer defeated a world champion) he went on to win 2 and draw 3 to prevail over “Deep Blue”. In 1997 IBM bested him with an upgraded “Deeper Blue”

• 1996: Fox News was launched in the US by Rupert Murdoch to exploit (what he saw as) an unaddressed need for a conservative TV network. Murdoch felt that existing news outlets leaned left without acknowledging it. Fox fostered a suspicion of Democratic politicians and policies and of the mainstream media. In the process, the network became the only news source that many American conservatives trusted. Fox was a business, which meant that ratings drove programming decisions. In this sense, Fox was a non-stop Republican message-testing machine. The goal was to find what resonated most with Fox viewers – a group that was becoming synonymous with the Republican base

• 1996, June: The incumbent President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, defeated Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov. His campaign worked to shift the narrative of the election into a referendum on whether voters wanted to return to their communist past (with Zyuganov), or continue with reforms (with Yeltsin). The media was apparently overwhelming supportive of Yeltsin. One of the reasons was their fear that a Communist government would dismantle Russia’s right to a free press. Yeltsin lobbied President Clinton to speak praisefully of Russia’s transition to democracy. He believed that this would strengthen his support from voters. Yeltsin’s campaign was largely funded through the so-called Davos pact, an agreement made during the 1996 World Economic Forum between Anatoly Chubais, who was leading the financial reforms in Russia, and a group of oligarchs. They agreed to provide financial support to Yeltsin and exercise their control over newly privatized media. Yeltsin would not complete the second term for which he was elected, as he resigned on 31 December 1999, eight months before the scheduled end of his term in August 2000 (See “1991, Dec”) 

• 1996, July: “Dolly” was the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell. She was a female Finnish Dorset sheep; her cloning proved that a cloned organism could be produced from a mature cell from a specific body part. One outcome, as stated by Ian Wilmut, the British scientist who led the cloning project, was that human cloning should never be permitted because of both the risk of birth defects and the fact that a clone would never be accepted as a full human being

• 1996, Oct: The First Congo War was a civil war which took place mostly in Zaire (which was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the process). It was also nicknamed Africa’s First World War.The conflict culminated in a foreign invasion that replaced Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko with the rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila (Kabila’s unstable government subsequently came into conflict with his allies, setting the stage for the Second Congo War in 1998–2003)

• 1996, Nov: The Arctic Council was formed as a high-level intergovernmental forum to enhance cooperation among the Arctic states with the active involvement of Arctic Indigenous Peoples. The members are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Russian Federation, and the US. “Observers” admitted are China, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and India

• 1996, Dec: First Hubble Deep Field (HDF) image constructed. The HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe. When another image was constructed three years later, the similarities between the two regions strengthened the belief that the universe is uniform over large scales and that the Earth occupies a typical region in the Universe (the cosmological principle – in essence saying that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.)

• 1997, March: Yeltsin appoints Putin deputy chief of the Presidential Staff, a post which he retained until May 1998

• 1997, May: The NATO-Russia Founding Act (NRFA) was signed enabling the creation of the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council (NRPJC). It has failed. The 2022 NATO Madrid summit declared Russia “a direct threat to Euro-Atlantic security” while the NATO–Russia Council was declared defunct. This was a political agreement – not a legally binding treaty. Despite efforts to structure forums that promote cooperation between Russia and NATO, relations as of 2024 have become severely strained over time due to post-Soviet conflicts and territory disputes involving Russia having broken out, including Azerbaijan (1990-19940; Moldova (1992-present); Georgia (2004-present); Lithuania (2006); Estonia (2006–2007); Poland (2006-present); Belarus (2007); Ukraine (2014-present); Syria (2015-present); Turkey (2015-2016); Kazakhstan (2021-2022); and Armenia (2022)

• 1997, July: Colonial Britain returned Hong Kong to China with Beijing promising to leave the region untouched by the Communist Party’s state apparatus for 50 years. Hong Kong could retain its autonomy and institutions (common-law legal system independent of China’s and an economy that was neoliberal to a fault), i.e. “one country, two systems”. This ended 156 years of British rule in the former colony

• 1997, Aug: Diana, Princess of Wales, died from injuries sustained in a car crash in Paris, France. Dodi Fayed, Diana’s partner, and Henri Paul, their chauffeur, were found dead inside the car. Prince Harry has used the loss of his mother to fuel his legal crusade against the British tabloids

• 1998, Jan: TheNorth American Ice Storm of 1998 was a massive combination of five smaller successive ice storms that struck a relatively narrow swath of land from eastern Ontario to southern Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and bordering areas in the US. It caused massive damage to trees and electrical infrastructure, a shutdown of activities in large cities like Montreal and Ottawa, and an unprecedented effort in reconstruction of the power grid 

• 1998, April: The Good Friday Agreement (GFA), or Belfast Agreement was a major development in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s. It is made up of the Multi-Party Agreement between most of Northern Ireland’s political parties, and the British-Irish Agreement between the British and Irish governments. The US brokered deal got Irish republican and British loyalist paramilitary groups to lay down their arms and set up a power-sharing agreement. Northern Ireland’s present devolved system of government is based on the agreement. The agreement remains a balancing act between nationalists (represented by the Sinn Fein party who want reunification with Ireland) and the unionists (represented by the Democratic Unionist Party who support keeping Northern Ireland within the UK). Both parties have effective vetoes over key measures making it difficult to pursue long-term policies. This has held Northern Ireland back. Further, Brexit has heightened concerns among unionists that the GFA isn’t working for them

• 1998: Pakistan became a nuclear power.In the 1980s, when it was an ally of the US in the first Afghan war against the collapsing Soviet Union, Pakistan quietly developed its own nuclear capacity. It now has approximately 160 warheads. If the current growth trend continues, Pakistan’s arsenal could grow to 220 to 250 warheads by 2025. Pakistan keeps its nuclear warheads stored separately from its missiles and will only assemble one if it will be used. Unlike India, Pakistan has not declared a No First Use policy, and instead has opted to emphasize smaller battlefield or “tactical” nuclear weapons as a counter to India’s larger and superior conventional forces. (See “1974”)

• 1998, May: Suharto, the president of Indonesia since 1967, resigns following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. What started as an oligarchic military dictatorship evolved into a personalistic authoritarian regime centred around Suharto. The country has grown: it’s now the world’s largest Muslim-majority state, it’s third-biggest democracy, and its fourth-most populous country (270M people) 

• 1998, July: Yeltsin appoints Putin director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the primary intelligence and security organization of the Russian Federation and the successor to the KGB (See “1999, Aug”)

• 1998, Aug: The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Québec does not have the right to unilaterally secede from Canada. The court unanimously decided that such a unilateral declaration would violate both Canadian constitutional law and international law. Nonetheless, the nine justices expressed the opinion that the other provinces and Ottawa would be obliged to enter into negotiations with Québec if voters in Québec unequivocally expressed their desire for independence by a clear majority. The court also said Parliament could determine whether the yes or no question on the referendum ballot clearly laid out the stakes for Quebecers. The result was the aptly named Clarity Act (Bill C20) was passed in June 2000 that codified the Supreme Court ruling (See “1995,Oct” and “2000, June”)

• 1998, Sept: Google is introduced and becomes one of the prominent and widely used search engines to date

• 1998, Nov: The most expensive human-made object in history – the International Space Station – was launched. The ISS is a collaboration between five space agencies: NASA (the US), Roscosmos (Russia), Jaxa (Japan), ESA (Europe) and CSA (Canada). It has been continuously operated since 2000, cost $100 billion, and has a full-time international crew

• 1998, Dec: US president Bill Clinton impeached and acquitted. The approved articles of impeachment from the US Congress (in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives) were submitted to the US Senate which acquitted him on February 1999 on both counts (the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by Paula Jones and the sexual relationship issue with White House intern Monica Lewinsky)

• 1999, Jan: The euro, the new money of 11 European nations, got off to a strong start on its first trading day, rising against the dollar on world currency markets and closed in New York at $1.181. A founding principal of the euro area held that national central banks be independent of their governments

• 1999, Mar-June: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) carried out an aerial bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War. The bombings continued until an agreement was reached that led to the withdrawal of Yugoslav armed forces from Kosovo, and the establishment of the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, a UN peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. It was the first time that NATO had used military force without the expressed endorsement of the UN Security Council and thus, international legal approval. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in the case of a decision by the Security Council under Chapter VII, or self-defence against an armed attack – neither of which were present in this case

• 1999, May: Five US guided bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade resulting in long term US/China antagonism. (NATO had been pummelling Yugoslavia from the skies since late that March to try to bring a halt to atrocities committed by President Slobodan Milosevic’s forces against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. The bombing was fiercely opposed by China and Russia.) The US had breached international law by bombing a Chinese diplomatic outpost. Three Chinese state journalists were killed and the Chinese public were outraged. The US and NATO wasted no time to announce that it was an accident; the real target was the headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement – a state agency that imported and exported defence equipment. US planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were based on an outdated map. They apologized, and paid reparations. However the narrative then being pushed in Chinese school textbooks, university classrooms and the media was that China – home to a great and benevolent civilization – had been subjugated and humiliated at the hands of Western powers for years. The Belgrade embassy bombing thus fit the story. The anger that ordinary Chinese felt can be understood in that historical context, being socialized to resent the West. It’s a murky story, as the embassy was China’s most significant intelligence collection platform in Europe, so there are those who believe it was deliberate

• 1999, July: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a campaign to “eradicate” the spiritual practice of Falun Gong, maintaining a doctrine of state atheism. This is in line with the communist governments efforts to rewrite history of unpleasant reminders and events. The Chinese government has alleged that Falun Gong (founded in 1992) is an “evil cult” or “heretical sect” and uses that official rationale to justify banning and eliminating the movement. There are reports of systematic torture, illegal imprisonment, forced labor, organ harvesting and abusive psychiatric measures

• 1999, Aug: Putin appointed prime minister of Russia and Yeltsin’s chosen successor. Then on Dec 31 Yeltsin resigns, leaving power in the hands of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. On March 2000 Putin is elected President of Russia (See “1998, July” and ”2000, March”)

• 1999, Aug: The Petronas Twin Towers opened in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia are officially designated as the tallest buildings in the world until they were surpassed by the 2004 completion of the Taipei 101. Also called the KLCC Twin Towers, they are a pair of 88-storey supertall skyscrapers standing at 1,483 feet. They are constructed largely of reinforced concrete, with a steel and glass facade designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art (See “2004, Dec” and “2010, Jan”)

• 1999, Sept: The Second Russian-Chechen War commenced. Putin ordered the air bombing of Grozny which marked the beginning the war. While the war began in 1999, and although active hostilities lasted until 2000, the counter-terrorist operation mode in the region lasted until 2009. Even today there are mass detentions and disappearances of young people in Chechnya, who are later found either in the police and officials’ offices, or not found at all. In Chechnya, there was no precise victory, great and shining, for the sake of which nothing was spared. Moreover, in Chechnya, the Russian army lost for years to volunteer guerrilla units, former farmers, and students, not to the professional military. Civilian casualties in Chechnya between 1999 and 2009 are incalculable and could amount to millions. The Russian army, especially during the second war, bombed civilian targets en masse, always claiming there were terrorists hiding there (See “1995, Dec-1996, Aug”)

• 1999, Sept: Explosions of residential buildings in Moscow were blamed on Chechen extremists but were in reality the work of the FSB to make Putin admired. Explosions also occurred in Ryazan and Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad – the site of the bloodiest battles of WWII). These bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya  and boosted Putin’s popularity in the lead-up to parliamentary elections and presidential transfer of power. The handling of the crisis by Putin, who was PM at the time, greatly boosted his popularity and helped him become president with a few months. While not proven in court, this thesis was explained in a 2002 book “Blowing Up Russia” by ex FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko (who in turn was killed by Russian assassins in 2006) (See “2006, Nov”)

• 1999, Sept: The G20 was founded in response to several world economic crises. It is an intergovernmental forum comprising 19 countries and the European Union (EU). It works to address major issues related to the global economy, such as international financial stability, climate change mitigation, and sustainable development. It was founded after the Asian financial crisis as a forum for the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors to discuss global economic and financial issues. It accounts for around 80% of gross world product (GWP), 75% of international trade, two-thirds of the global population, and 60% of the world’s land area. The African Union has been included as a member in 2023 (See “ 2023, Sept”)

• 1999, Dec: President of Russia Boris Yeltsin resigned six months before the end of his term, leaving power in the hands of Prime Minister Putin, his chosen successor whom he had appointed prime minister a few months earlier. He seemed determined to try to put a lock on Putin’s succession to the presidency in the coming March, 2000 election. He did it when popular support for Putin was at a high to increase Putin’s chance of being elected. Yeltsin had transformed Russia’s command economy into a capitalist market economy by implementing economic shock therapy, market exchange rate of the ruble, nationwide privatization, and lifting of price controls. Economic downturn, volatility and inflation ensued

• 1999, Dec-2000, Jan: Y2K or the Millenium bug was a world scare however few major errors occurred. Computer errors related to the formatting and storage of calendar dates for years in and after the year 2000 were predicted. Many programs represented four-digit years with only the final two digits. People stocked up on food, water, and firearms, and withdrew large sums of money in anticipation of an computer induced apocalypse.In fact, few major errors occurred in 2000

Recap: According to Charles Tilly, “Altogether, about 100 million people died as a direct result of action by organized military units backed by one government or another over the course of the century. Most likely a comparable number of civilians died of war-induced disease and other indirect effects.”