POST-WAR TO 1999

1944-1960

French decolonization

French decolonization began with independence for Syria (1944) and Lebanon (1945). The Japanese occupied French Indochina in 1940-1941. The Vietnamese started their war for independence immediately after World War II. The French were hard-pressed and let go of Laos and Cambodia in 1953. They tried to suppress the communists in Vietnam but were defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The French politician Pierre Mendès-France read the signs and became primer minister with the promise that he would get France out of the Indochinese quagmire in a month, which he did at Geneva (1954), where Vietnam was partitioned into a southern pro-western half and a communist north. Independence for Morocco and Tunisia came in 1956. The French Community was created in 1958 as the framework for decolonization. Both French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa were dissolved in 1959. In 1960, France granted independence to its African colonies, which joined the French Community, except Guinea which voted to go it alone.

1945-1946

United Nations

On 11 February 1945, at Yalta, in the Crimea, president Roosevelt, primer minister Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin expressed their intention to create "a general international organization to maintain peace and security". The Dumbarton Oaks project in the form of the 111-article Charter of the United Nations was approved by the delegates of 50 states at the San Francisco conference which ran from 25 April to 26 June 1945. The Charter was ratified on 25 October 1945 by the Security Council of the UN constituted by the China, France, the UK, the USA, and the USSR, its permanent members, as it had been by a majority of the other signatories. The first General Assembly of the UN convened in Westminster, London, on 10 January 1946.

1945-1947

The transistor was invented twice: once, by German scientists in Westinghouse laboratories in Paris, and in 1947 in AT&T laboratories in New Jersey. The transistor is a device used to amplify a current and conduct it to a yes-or-no or 1-or-0 gate. Later it was adapted for use in computers, which before were electro-mechanical. William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter H. Brattain, of AT&T, share the Nobel prize for physics in 1956.
First dialysis is performed.

1946

Willard F. Libby discovers radioactive carbon 14, used for dating. He won the Nobel prize in 1960.

C. Carlson invents xerography.

1946-1997

British decolonization

The dismantling of the British colonial empire after the Second World War is best described by regions. (1) In the Near East, Jordan was independent in 1946. Arab-Jewish conflict prevented the independence of Palestine, which Great Britain handed over to the United Nations and in 1949 became mostly Israel. In the Mediterranean Cyprus was independent in 1960 (delayed because of attempts to unite with Greece) and Malta in 1964. Aden was independent South Yemen in 1967. (2) After World War II, when independence approached, the two Indian sides could not come to an agreement. In 1947, India and Pakistan went their separate ways. Almost immediately they began warring over Kashmir. Ceylon (later Sri Lanka) and Burma (later Myanmar) achieved independence in 1948. Malaya was independent in 1957, but the departure of British troops was delayed by a communist insurrection, called the Emergency and officially over in 1960. With the addition of Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak, it became Malaysia in 1963. Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965. Brunei chose to remain a protectorate until 1983. (3) In Africa, Sudan gained its independence in 1954, Ghana in 1957, Nigeria in 1960, Tanganyka in 1961 (it became Tanzania after union with Zanzibar, which obtained independence in 1963), Uganda in 1962, Kenya in 1963 (delayed because of the Mau Mau insurrection), Zambia and Malawi in 1964, and The Gambia in 1965. White-dominated Rhodesia seceded in 1964. It became Zimbabwe in 1980, when the previous regime caved in. Swaziland achieved independence in 1968. (4) In the Caribbean, Great Britain consolidated some of its possessions into the Federation of the West Indies, which lasted from 1958 to 1962. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, Barbados in 1966, Bahamas in 1973, Grenada in 1974, Dominica in 1978, St. Vincent and St. Lucia in 1979, Antigua and Barbuda in 1981, and Belize in 1982, the last of the colonies to go, delayed because of Guatemalan territorial claims. (5) In the Indian ocean, Mauritius achieved independence in 1968 and Seychelles and the Maldives in 1976. In the Pacific ocean, tiny Nauru became independent in 1968, Fiji and Tonga in 1970, Tuvalu and the Solomons in 1978, Kiribati in 1979, and Vanuatu in 1980. Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997.

1946-1975

Vietnamese war of independence

The British occupied Saigon which they turned over to the French. The Nationalist Chinese stepped into Hanoi but left the Vietminh in place. France refused to recognize Vietnamese independence, for which they used extreme military force (bombardment of Haiphong), thus setting off in 1946 the Vietnamese War of Independence, which was to last until 1975.

The Vietnamese guerrillas, who counted on Chinese and Soviet backing, soon had infiltrated most of northern Vietnam.In 1949, the French brought back Bao Dai to head a pro-western government. In 1950, communist North Korea invaded US-backed South Korea. US aid to the French in Vietnam increased. In 1953, the French granted independence to Cambodia under prince Norodom Sihanouk.

The French thought they could defeat the guerrillas once and for all if these could be made, literally, to come out and fight. In 1954, French forces occupied and fortified the valley of Dien Bien Phu, in northwestern Vietnam, near the Laotian border, where they hoped to draw out the enemy. The Vietnamese surrounded Dien Bien Phu with troops and cannon (lugged piece by piece over the mountainous jungle) and gradually closed the circle on the French forces, which capitulated in May.

The French politician Pierre Mendès-France became prime minister with the solemn undertaking that he would end the French involvement in Vietnam in one month. Amazingly he kept his word in the Geneva Conference—convened even as French forces were being besieged in Dien Bien Phu—in which Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel. The north became the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam, capital Hanoi. In Saigon, Bao Dai named Ngo Dinh Diem prime minister. The communists accepted the division of their country only as a provisional arrangement.

Elections in the south, which had been set for 1956, were suspended by Diem, who also deposed Bao Dai and declared the Republic of Vietnam. With the support of members of his family, he assumed dictatorial powers. This was the signal for renewed hostilities, which were carried forward by the so-called Vietcong (Vietnamese communist guerrillas), directed by Giap, the military genius of the war. During 1959, the North Vietnamese began the construction of lines of supply through the jungles along the Laotian and Cambodian borders, often overlapping into Cambodia (Ho Chi Minh Trail).

            With John Kennedy in the presidency, the United States formalized its support for the Saigon government by treaties signed in 1961 and the following year there were 12,000 Americans in Vietnam imitating the "strategic hamlets" strategy which had worked wonders in Malaya for the British against the isolated communist insurrection. In Vietnam, Diem, who was a Catholic, had to face fanatical Buddhist opposition. His sister-in-law, known by the press as the Dragon Lady, once mocked a Buddhist monk who had burned himself to death in protest against the Saigon government.

            The American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, regularly sent negative reports on Diem and his government. In 1963, when the American presence in Vietnam was increasing, general Duong Van Minh staged a coup in which Diem was killed. Kennedy was assassinated in November of that year. He was succeeded by vice-president Lyndon Johnson.

            The overthrow of Diem made South Vietnam politically unstable and in 1964 another military man, Nguyen Khanh, came to power. The same year the fabricated Tonkin Gulf Incident—supposedly Vietnamese torpedo boats twice charging at large American warships—led to congressional backing for a full American military commitment in Vietnam, which in essence, for many Vietnamese, if not a majority of them, became a neo-colonialist war against the forces of nationalism. The US began the bombing of North Vietnam, which tended to grow in intensity as the war deteriorated, which it began to do when the Vietcong attacked US military installations, such as the Bien Hoa air base, in the heart of South Vietnam.

            A dashingly attired Vietnamese air force officer, Nguyen Cao Ky, came to power in Saigon in 1965. Vietcong units were regularly defeating the South Vietnamese army. The US military presence was boosted exponentially under the overly optimistic Gen. William Westmoreland. By the end of the year there were 200,000 American soldiers in Vietnam and by the end of 1966 the figure was 400,000. (Other estimates for mid-1966 were: 740,000 South Vietnam army and 190,000 USA ground troops against 300,000 Vietcong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars.)

            American troops were not there to intervene in domestic affairs and internal political opposition to Saigon became intense in Hué and Danang. The latter was an important strategic US air and land base.

            In 1967, under trying social circumstances, Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president and Nguyen Cao Ky took the back seat as vicepresident. Secretary of Defense Robert Mcnamara recognized that the bombing of North Vietnam was ineffectual. The fortress of Khesanh, next to the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Vietnam, came under siege. US forces in Vietnam reached 500,000.

            In 1968, American claims of imminent victory were belied when the communists launched the Tet Offensive in Hué, combining regular North Vietnamese troops and South Vietnamese guerrillas. The communists were ejected with heavy losses from the imperial palace and its vast walled grounds and their offensive capabilities were severely affected. But US strategic plans about Vietnam were being reconsidered.

            Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced the discredited Westmoreland and US forces peaked at 540,000. The My Lai massacre of Vietnamese villagers by US troops became a national scandal. However, over the years since the end of the American involvement in Vietnam, there have been other revelations of similar atrocities, in one of which a prominent polician was involved. In 2003, various former officers volunteered to the press that the American soldiers' hostility to the Vietnamese population was pronounced and that the killing of civilians was commonplace.

            Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election and Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey, who could not quite disassociate himself from Johnson's failed Vietnam policy. Theoretician of realistic international politics, Henry Kissinger was given the task by Nixon of putting an end to the Vietnam war, which he basically interpreted as giving in without losing face. During a lull in the bombing of North Vietnam, tentative talks to end the war began in Paris.

            In 1969, Ho Chi Minh died (and was given the communist mummification treatment) but this did not affect the steadiness with which North Vietnam pursued its strategic objectives. The secret bombing of Cambodia commenced with the fairlessly hopeless aim of disrupting the Ho Chi Minh Trail. However, Vietnamization also began with a reduction in US forces.

            In America, anti-war sentiment reached a peak with a huge demonstration in Washington. One such manifestation turned very wrong when National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio fired at a crowd of protesting students and four were killed (1970).

            Prince Sihanouk, who was caught between the fire of Vietnamese communists using Cambodian territory to supply their forces in the south and the American bombings of eastern Cambodia, was overthrown by the American backed but ineffectual Gen. Lon Nol.

            The Nixon/Kissinger strategy was to pound away at Vietnam and Cambodia and keep diplomatic channels open. In 1972, even as Hanoi and Haiphong were being intensively bombed, Nixon visited China and normalized relations with the Mao Zedong regime in the midst of its back-to-stone-age-egalitarianism Cultural Revolution.

            The North Vietnamese captured Quang Tri north of Hué, which showed that the communists recovered quite rapidly from the defeat in Hué. Kissinger and the North Vietnamese foreign minister Le Duc Tho began direct talks. Nixon was easily re-elected against peace candidate George McGovern, who faded from politics but in 2003 resurfaced to say that America's involvement in Iraq was not unlike the situation in Vietnam.

            In 1973, after the largest bombardments ever, the US pulled out of Vietnam and left in place the government headed by Nguyen Van Thieu, who had been re-elected under irregular circumstances in 1971. There was a cease-fire and Vietnamization was accomplished with a huge arsenal left in the hands of the South Vietnamese armed forces.

            In 1975, when the communists launched a coordinated offensive in north and central Vietnam, Thieu abandoned the northern provinces and his government collapsed. In the month of April, Saigon fell to the army of North Vietnam and Phnom Penh was captured by the Khmer Rouge, the main political beneficiaries of the useless bombings of Cambodia. The Cambodian communists proceeded to establish one of the worst reigns of terror in history. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, which is a name even ordinary Vietnamese today use sparingly.

1947

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., speculate about visible matter, which by itself does not exert the gravitational force to keep the universe together. This is the basis of the strong hypothesis about dark matter.

The first Supersonic airplane, the Bell XS-1, is flown by Chuck Yeager, fighter ace and later general in the air force.

1947-1949

The Truman doctrine

The Greek anti-German resistance movement had been strong and leftist and after the war it became a communist insurrection with the backing of Greece's communist neighbors (Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia). Britain declared that it could not afford to defend Greece. In 1947, American president Harry S. Truman affirmed his country's willingness to help states under communist attack. This became known as the Truman Doctrine and was applied later in Korea. In Greece, American aid turned the tide—the country was pacificed in 1949—but it is also likely that informally at Yalta and Potsdam the Americans and Russians had reached some degree of agreement on western and eastern spheres of influence in the Balkans.

1947-1952

After Japan was endowed with a truly democratic constitution (1947), it recovered its sovereignty through a peace treaty with the USA (1951-1952), not subscribed by the USSR.

1947-1972

India and Pakistan

When the Labor Party won the 1945 elections in Great Britain and Clement Attlee replaced Churchill as prime minister, it was a foregone conclusion that India would be granted independence as soon as possible after the war, a perspective that Churchill had refused even to consider. Lord Wavell, a general and the viceroy since 1943, knew that stormy times lay ahead for India, as was shown in the disturbances that occurred on 16 August 1946, a result of the Muslim League's declaration of a "direct action day" to demonstrate its determination to achieve an independent Islamic state in India.

            Lord Louis Mountbatten, another military commander, competent and brave albeit dandyish, was offered the viceroyalty and he accepted reluctantly. Basically, Mountbatten went to India in 1947 with full powers to liquidate British rule without making much of a fuss. He overdid himself. Rather than trying to force Nehru and Jinnah to negotiate, he accepted Jinnah's utter rejection of the idea of an independent and united India and he accepted Nehru's objections to any scheme that smacked of self-determination for India's provinces. As Hindus and Muslims could not do it themselves, a British arbiter, sir Cyril Radcliffe, was appointed to trace the line of Partition between India and Pakistan, especially in the Punjab, where the population was geographically inter-mixed and numerically about even between Hindus and Sikhs, who accepted living as neighbors, and Muslims.

            Independence was declared on 15 August 1947, earlier than initially foreseen, on a day chosen by Mountbatten. Even as India and Pakistan were forming separate governments, Partition was being done in a closed room using large-scale maps and population statistics. British administrators, including Mountbatten, knew the bloody chaos that was coming, but Nehru, who became the first Indian prime minister, apparently was not prepared for anything as tragic as what happened.

            The application of the Partition in practice was the signal for the largest mass exodus of populations in history, but it did not happen in peace: the bloodshed that ensued was the result of fighting at a basic community level and between Hindu and Muslim refugee populations moving in different directions. Most of the atrocities that the migrating masses inflicted on each other were in the Punjab. The most Dantesque situation was that of the city of Lahore, ceded to Pakistan, where nearly half the population was Hindu and Sikh. When the flames died down there were hardly a thousand non-Muslims left. Calcutta was almost set to go the way of Lahore, but Gandhi pleaded and fasted and the killings were less savage.

            In the Punjab, the mass migrations involved 10 million Hindus moving to India and 7,5 million Muslims moving to Pakistan. The toll of the dead is not known but it is placed at half a million at most and at no less than 200,000. In Bengal the population exchange and the dead were on less gigantic scales, but Gandhi reaped the odium of fanatical Hindus because he was promoting tolerance between religious communities as well as defending Pakistan's allotment of the treasury it previously shared with India.

            Because of its majority Muslim population, the British-dependent kingdom of Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan, but it had a Hindu ruler, Hari Singh, who wanted to make it independent. Pakistan staged an invasion of Kashmir with looting Pathans, tribesmen from the Northwest Province. The Indian government got the Kashmiri rajah to transfer the territory to India. Indian airborne troops arrived in time to frustrate the Pakistani incursion aimed at Srinagar. The commanders of troops on both sides were British, but the Pakistani army arrived too late to dislodge the Indians. A cease fire according to the principle of uti ibi ubi possidetis (you get to keep what you control physically) was agreed under UN auspices in 1949. Kashmir remained unevenly divided with India retaining most of the population and the Srinagar heartland.

            In January 1948, Gandhi was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic from Maharashtra who practically walked in and out of the Mahatma's loaned residence in Delhi without any police constraints or restrictions. When it came to choosing India's national emblem, Asoka's regal wheel of the law of karma was chosen over Gandhi's humble spinning wheel. Mountbatten left India in June 1948. Though he emerged unscathed in body and reputation from the crisis he in part created he was killed by an IRA terrorist bomb in 1979. In 1949, Hyderabad, ruled by a miserly rajah who sometimes used a huge diamond as a paperweight, was the last of the former British-sponsored semi-kingdoms to be incorporated into India. In 1950, India declared itself a republic without leaving the Commonwealth of Nations, to whose subsistence India is practically indispensable. Kashmir became an open sore in the relations between India and Pakistan and resulted in two additional wars: in 1965, when Pakistan launched two offensives and India won by advancing on Lahore; and in 1971-72, when India intervened in support of Bangladeshi independence.

1948

The British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle proposes the theory of a stable state universe. He coined the phrase Big Bang in derision.

Alfred Kinsey publishes his work Sexual behavior in the human male, about American sexual mores. It tried to demonstrate, among other things, that homosexual experiences were more widespread than previously believed. In 1953, Kinsey published Sexual behavior in the human female. Adultery here was the big surprise.

The first step towards the European Union was taken in the Brussels Treaty for economic cooperation and mutual self-defense subscribed by Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

1948-1949

The Soviets tried to annex Berlin through a land blockade in 1948, which the Allies frustrated with an airlift involving 278,228 flights lasting until the blockade was lifted in 1949.

During the Arab-Israeli war (Israeli war of independence), Egypt retained the Gaza strip and Jordan the West Bank. Israel was immediately recognized by the USSR and the USA.

In June 1948, the UN undertook its first peace mission, the UN Truce Supervision Organization, in Palestine. In 10 December 1948, the UN adopted an Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

1949-1952

As part of an effort to put Europe back on its feet the US created the Marshall Plan, named after secretary of state George C. Marshall, which lent liberally to European countries starting in 1948 and until 1952. American aid was instrumental in the creation of the Organization for European Economic Development, which in 1961 was transformed into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) grouping highly developed countries (as distinct from the third world or developing countries).

1949

Soviet atomic bomb tested in September.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organizations is formed against the USSR.

Shorn of Silesia and of most of Pomerania and Prussia by the Soviets, Germany was divided into four occupation zones assigned to the USSR (eastern Germany), the United States (Bavaria and southern Germany), Great Britain (northern Germany), and France (the Rhineland and the Saar). The western powers pooled their zones into the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, capital Bonn (Beethoven's birthplace), and the Soviets followed suit by creating in their zone the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Berlin, which was engulfed by the Soviet armies, was also divided into four zones, the eastern Soviet part becoming capital of East Germany.

Indonesia becomes independent.

The Council of Europe was an informal group formed to promote European unity. Its most noted offshoot is the European Court of Human Rights.

Communist China

Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, joined by Zhu De, commander of other insurrectionary forces, the communists initiated the Long March (1934-1937) which culminated in their occupation of territories around Yan'an, northern Shaanxi province. The core of the communist forces was formed by the 8th Route Army led by Xu Xiangqian. In 1931 the Japanese had occupied Shenyang (Mukden) and the following year set up the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo with the Qing heir Pu Yi as its nominal head. A state of war existed between China and Japan from July 1937. At the height of its occupation, Japan controlled the coast of China and territories as far inland as Hubei and Shanxi, which were evacuated in 1945. Manchuria was overrun by the communists. In 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist armies took refuge in Taiwan, claiming to be the legitimate Republic of China.

1950

The Dutch astronomer Jan Oort proposes a very eccentric orbital belt along which comets travel from beyond Pluto, halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, to within planetary orbits.

1950-1953

In 1950, the North Koreans, with the support of Stalin, invaded South Korea, whose defences crumbled. The Security Council of the United Nations (UN) took advantage of a Soviet boycott in protest for the non-admittance of Communist China and voted to intervene. The Americans held a perimeter around the southeastern Korean port of Busan (formerly Pusan). After a landing in Incheon, Seoul’s port, followed by landings on the northeastern coast of Korea, UN troops, under the command of the American Gen. Douglas MacArthur, outflanked the communist forces and drove the rest to the Yalu river provoking the intervention of communist China. MacArthur was cashiered for advocating the use of nuclear weapons despite official American policy. The UN forces—from many countries, significantly from Great Britain and other members of the Commonwealth of Nations, but mostly American—fought a rearguard action back to approximately where the previous frontier had been, with rectifications to make it more compact. An armistice was signed in 1953 in Panmunjon, but there has not been a peace treaty, which means that technically the two Koreas are still at war.

1951

Electric power is generated from atomic energy.

The German Herbert Matare invents the transistor radio.

Following a plan of the French economist Jean Monnet, French foreign minister Robert Schuman promoted the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), a pooling of resources by France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux, approved by the Treaty of Paris of 1951.

1951-1953

Iran

In 1951, there began a tug of war between, on one side, the nationalist prime minister Muhammad Mussadegh, and on the other, the young Reza Shah supported by the western powers. Mussadegh, who was prone to crying in public, nationalized the oil industry and was removed in 1952. He returned and Reza Shah had to leave the country. American secret services were openly conspiring against Mussadegh, who was finally ousted and Reza Shah brought back in 1953.

1951-1954

In Guatemala. Gen. Jacobo Arbenz (1951-1954), who had the support of communists within and outside Guatemala, carried on vigorously a reformist program. Landowners, particularly United Fruit, were alarmed and much of the army was disaffected. The CIA did not have to look far for a pawn, who was armed with a few airplanes and dropped a bomb or two on the capital. The armed forces did not rise to the occasion and Arbenz was overthrown by Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. Ernest "Che" Guevara, two years later Fidel Castro's sidekick, had his revolutionary baptism of fire in Guatemala, where he and hundreds of other leftists took asylum in the Mexican Embassy.

1952-1954

The rise of Nasser

In 1951, the Egyptians rescinded the 1936 agreement with the British and claimed the Sudan. The following year the Young Officers group, headed by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, deposed Faruk and took power using Gen. Mohammad Naguib as a front. Under the revolutionary colonels' regime in Egypt, Sudan in 1953 was granted autonomy pending a plebiscite in three years to determine its final status. Pro-Egyptian politicians won but decided nevertheless to declare the independence of the Sudan (1956). After removing Naguib and dealing harshly with the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser consolidated his personal rule (1954).

1952

The De Havilland Comet becomes the first jetliner.

The Mycenaean script Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris. There is also a Linear A which has not been deciphered. It is in the pictographic Minoan writing.

America's first fusion or thermonuclear device (hydrogen bomb) detonated on Eniwetok atoll.

Sues Canal crisis

Egypt was the largest Arab country and therefore was expected to lead the opposition to Israel. This role became unavoidable in 1956, when Nasser, who was Egypt's leader since 1952, nationalized the Suez Canal. In connivance with Britain and France, Israel invaded the Sinai and British and French paratroops occupied the canal with the excuse of separating the contenders. Strong international condemnation led by the USA, aborted the operation and UN peacekeepers were stationed in the Sinai.

1952-1989

The European Organization for Nuclear Research—better known as CERN from the French initials for its original name, European Council for Nuclear Research—was created as a particle physics laboratory. It has expanded its facilities over time. In 1989 it inaugurated a 27-km long collider. In 1983, at CERN, Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer discovered the w and z particles which are considered to be conveyors of the weak nuclear force manifest in radioactive decay.

1953

The American James Watson and the Briton Francis Crick using x-ray crystallography discover the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), to which is attributed the role of passing on genetic information. DNA is the bottom line definition of life. It is the action of DNA on proteins, which have no DNA but are often described as the building blocks of life, that beget specific human traits as different from phylogenetic traits. Together with the Briton Maurice Wilkins, Crick and Watson shared the Nobel prize for medicine and physiology in 1962.

Cigarette smoking is associated with lung cancer.

The USSR tests a hydrogen bomb.

1953-1955

Death of Stalin and rise of Khrushchev

Stalin died on 5 March 1953. There followed a brief period of collective leadership, in which nonetheless Beria acted as if he were the kingpin. Ironically coming from the master of terror, he released over a million captives in the Gulag, he loosened the Soviet hold on the nationalities within the USSR, and he was even willing to let East Germany go as long as it was neutral. In private, he denigrated Stalin with intense hatred. William Taubman, who did a critical book on Nikita Khrushchev, writes: "Beria was not a closet liberal; he played the role of reformer just because he was drenched in blood." But this is illogical if only in that such a person would not want his victims going around saying how deep in blood he was. Incidentally, the first prisoner released by Beria was the wife of the Stalin ultra-loyalist and minister of foreign affairs Vyacheslav Molotov.

However, what Molotov and his fellows in the politburo probably perceived was a Beria hungry for power who would not hesitate to liquidate them. The top contenders were basically, besides Beria, Georgy Malenkov, who had the marks of an heir apparent, and Nikita Khrushchev, a Russian technocrat with a political base in Ukraine. After sundry maneuvers, the crucial one being the arrest and subsequent execution of Beria (December 1953), Malenkov emerged as the apparent winner but he was defeated politically in 1955 by Khrushchev, who kept up the appearances of collective leadership by going on official trips with Nikolai Bulganin as prime minister.

1955

Creation of the Warsaw Pact as a foil to NATO

1954

J.E. Salk discovers the anti-polio serum.

Nobel prize in physics to Linus Pauling for the study of molecular forces.

First kidney transplant successfully carried out.

1954-1962

Algerian war of independence

The Algerian war of independence began in 1954 led by the National Liberation Front (FNL). It was characterized by terrorism and guerrilla warfare on the side of Algerians and by unscrupulous French military repression (including torture) and reprisals by European settlers against the Arab-speaking population. The cause of the pieds noirs was strongly and controversially publicized by the leftist intellectual Albert Camus, who was Algerian by birth and refused to endorse the nationalist terrorist campaign against French rule. Camus' main argument was that his mother still lived in Algiers.

            By 1956, the French armed forces had eliminated the local FNL leadership. Algeria was literally fenced in by barbed wire along the border with Tunisia, where the nationalists had taken refuge. With the support of the armed forces, who wanted unequivocal backing for French Algeria, general Charles de Gaulle came to power (1958) in what amounted to a coup d'état against the Fourth Republic leading to the creation of the Fifth Republic.

            The situation in Algeria was explosive and the international mood was anti-colonialist. De Gaulle equivocated and in 1962, having put down an insurrection of the French garrisons in Algeria (1961)—led by Gen. Raoul Salan and the intellectual Jacques Soustelle—he accepted Algerian independence. This resulted in the resettlement in France of the million or so European-descended pieds noirs who until then had considered Algeria their homeland.

1954-1968

The Civil Rights movement in the USA

The civil rights movement in America against racial discrimination and for the enfranchisement of blacks was a direct consequence of the previous strategy of litigation which culminated in the Brown v. Board of Education decision invalidating “separate but equal” and enjoining school integration. This law was generally ignored but it generated mass, non-violent action against segregation in general. Martin Luther King, jr., was widely accepted as the most influential black activist after he successfully led the movement for the integration of the Montgomery, Alabama, public transportation system (1956). In a huge march on Washington in 1962, King made his immortal “I have a vision” speech. When president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, made the civil rights cause his own and achieved the approval in Congress of the crucial Voting Rights act of 1965, which barred qualifications of any sort for the right to vote. There were race riots in many cities which produced an exodus of whites to the suburbs and urban decay. In 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to give support to a strike by sanitation workers.    

1955

The Afro-Asian summit is celebrated in Bandung, Indonesia. Its promoters included Myanmar, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. Twenty-nine other countries, including China, sent delegates. The over-all trend was for neutrality between communism and capitalism.

1956

The oral contraceptive pill invented.

Khrushchev and the 20th Congress of CPSU

Though he was of peasant origin and he died a communist, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes in his epochal speech at the 20th Communist Party congress in 1956. Among other things, he revealed that after the so-called Congress of Victory, Stalin ordered political purges within the party that resulted in 1,920,635 arrests, of which 688,503 ended in liquidation. There were no grounds for these secret proceedings, known as the Great Purge (1935-1938). Khrushchev also accused Stalin of a collapse of leadership when the USSR was attacked by Germany in 1941, a charge which is not easy to sustain.

1957

Geophysical year

The USSR launches Sputnik, the first man-made satellite of Earth.

Hugh Everett III and John Wheeler speculate from quantum wave theory that there could be more than one universe, assuming that one takes too seriously the variable positioning of positive and negative electrons.

The success of the ECSC culminates in the Treaty of Rome which created the European Economic Community (EEC), whose goal was the achievement of a common market based on a customs union, and the European Atomic Community. The EEC was integrated with France, the Benelux countries, Italy, and the Federal Republic of Germany. Another treaty created Euratom (European atomic energy commission).

1958

Formation of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA)

The satellite Explorer I, basically equipped with a Geiger counter, discovers the van Allen radiation belts.

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (east of San Francisco) for atomic weapons development opens under the extremely anti-communist Edward Teller (director to 1960).

Jack Kilby puts together the integrated circuit or microchip with transistors and other components, for which in 2000 he received the Nobel prize for physics.

In Venezuela, dictator Marcos Pérez Jimenez was overthrown in a popular uprising that undermined military hierarchy and Venezuela became a democracy, the second oldest in Latin America, with elections every five years.

1958-1960

China: “Great Leap Forward” and break with the USSR

Impatient with the pace of economic development, Mao, against the consensus of his main party collaborators, launched the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958), through which industrialization was to be carried out collectively from the village level upward. This was a catastrophic failure. Mao, who encouraged his own personality cult, was appalled at the denunciation of Stalin by Soviet party secretary general Nikita Khrushchev and Soviet-Chinese relations deteriorated to the breaking point in 1960.

1958-1969

With French technology, Israel builds the Negev Nuclear Research Center, ostensibly for de-salinization, but in fact to develop nuclear weapons, which it had by around 1963. The USA demanded on-site inspections, which were granted but usually announced before hand. The inspections were suspended in 1969.

1959

The Nobel prize is awarded to Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain for the discovery of the anti-proton, which was a theoretical requisite for atomic stability.

The radio reflector satellite and the weather satellite Tiros I launched.

Optical microwave laser used.

1959-1961

Cuban revolution and Playa Girón

A sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, participated in the overthrow of the dictator Gerardo Machado (1925-1933)—he was originally a businessman—and went on to become the dominant figure in Cuban politics, favorable to reformism. After losing an election in 1944, Batista retired from politics but returned in 1952 and took over through a military coup. His second regime was characterized by repressive brutality and the tolerance of US gangsterism.  

            The incompetent and demoralized military were defeated by the few thousand guerrillas that Fidel Castro, a son of a Spanish immigrant at the time the USA defeated Spain, led in the high, jungle-covered eastern cordillera of Cuba. Castro, once a prisoner of the Batista regime, later pardoned and released, entered Havana on 1 January 1959. Castro, whose closest companion was the itinerant Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, veered from the Latin American norm by ordering hundreds of executions against Batista's soldiery and police.

            At first hailed as a democratic reformer with spotless hands, a misperception that he encouraged, Castro soon turned to the extreme left and even said publicly that he had always been a Marxist-Leninist, a claim with no documentary backing. The Cuban revolution's nationalizations without compensation and its coziness with the USSR led to a break with the United States towards the end of the Eisenhower administration (1961). By the time of Castro's open profession of communism, there had been an USA-encouraged mass exodus to Florida of Cuba's upper and middle classes, the only ones who could have offered an effective opposition to Castro within Cuba.

            Eisenhower willed to his successor, John F. Kennedy, a CIA-orchestrated plan to invade Cuba with a brigade of Cuban exiles, trained in Guatemala, plus a couple of World War II vintage airplanes. The idea was that the Cuban masses would arise in anger and kick the scoundrels out. The invasion, known in the USA as the Bay of Pigs, landed in Giron beach, south east of Havana. The place couldn't have been chosen better if Castro had done it himself. The invaders could only advance along one road. Castro's combat-hardened troops contained them and his tiny air force harassed their rear isolating them. Most of the brigade was captured and the USA was left with egg on its face.

French explode their first atomic bomb.

1960

Austria, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland form the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
The atomic submarine USS Triton does an underwater circumnavigation.
The organizer of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, is captured by the Israeli Mosad intelligence agency in Argentina, from where he is flown toIsrael, tried, and hanged.

1960-1965

Independence of the ex-Belgian Congo

In 1960, president Joseph Kasavubu and primer minister Patrice Lumumba were in charge during the peaceful transition to independence—except for a farcical incident in which a Congolese man grabbed king Baudoin's sword during a motorcade—but soon the primer minister of Katanga (now Shaba), Moise Tshombe, under the influence of Belgian mining interests and with the backing of European mercenaries, declared Katanga independent. Lumumba appealed to United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjold. Lumumba's leftism was antagonizing others than Tshombe. Joseph Mobutu, head of the incipient Congolese armed forces and a former Lumumba ally, saw an opening to power. Lumumba was arrested and escaped. After being recaptured, he was handed to over to Tshombe who had him killed. There still exists an international university in Moscow called Patrice Lumumba. In 1961, Tshombe was named primer minister. With his mercenaries he tried to keep the lid on the Congo, where his own Katanga province remained in rebellion. It was through UN intervention, which cost the life of Hammarskjold in an air crash (1961), that in 1963 Katanga and in 1964 Kisangani (former Stanleyville), a Lumumbist redoubt, were reduced. Hammarskjold is the only posthumous recipient of a Noble Peace Prize (1961). The suppression of Congolese separatism set the international understanding in Africa that secessions from established states were not to be recognized or encouraged. In 1965, Kasavubu and Tshombe were at odds and Mobutu took power in a coup.

1961

The Russian Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in orbit.

Kuwait becomes independent.

Conference of non-aligned countries is celebrated in Belgrade.

1962

The EEC establishes a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It consists in subsidies for crops. All EEC members contributed to its finances and all received back payments. Since France was a big agricultural subsidizer, it was accepted that it should be a net contributor. Thus, some countries in the EEC were net contributors and others were net beneficiaries.

John Glenn, later senator, becomes the first American in space.

NASA launches the Telstar I satellite which receives, amplifies, and returns radio signals. Satellites of this type are used in the Geopositional System (GPS). Through GPS, it is possible to establish the exact position of any point moving or stationary on the surface of the globe. Apart from its other countless uses (navigation, locating missing conveyances, etc.), in time it could become the primary means of preventing crime.

India

India annexed Goa in 1961. It was attacked by China who wanted to secure lands in Ladakh through which it had built a road from Tibet to Xinjuiang.

Cuban missiles crisis

Castro encouraged Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the USSR, to install intermediate range (IMR), nuclear-tipped missiles on Cuban soil (1962). This went far beyond what John Kennedy was disposed to tolerate and the American president told the Soviets that their merchant ships carrying the weapons would be intercepted in the high seas by the American navy. The stage seemed set for Armageddon, but the Russians backed down. Just prior to this, however, Kennedy had negotiated with the Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin the removal of the obsolescent American IMR Jupiter missiles from their base in Izmir, Turkey, which was accomplished after the missiles crisis (October).

1963

T.A. Matthews and A.R. Sandage discover strong energy-emitting quasars, neither stars nor galaxies.

Artificial heart is designed.

Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, a book that became influential world-wide on the formation of women’s movements.

The USA and the USSR sign in Moscow a partial nuclear bomb-tests ban, later voluntarily converted to a total ban.

The US, the UK, and the USSR sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

The EEC got a substantial boost with the Elysée Treaty between France and Germany in which these two countries, central to the success of any pan-

European project, committed themselves fully to cooperate in bringing about a more united Europe.

1964

The American physicists Val Fitch and James Cronin demonstrate the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter that permitted the universe to arise. The asymmetry is marginal in comparison with the reciprocal destruction of matter and anti-matter during the Big Bang (1927). Fitch and Cronin shared the Nobel prize in 1980.

R.W. Wilson and A. Penzias discover background cosmic radiation, used as evidence for Big Bang theory.

A rash of gratuitous assassinations of civil rights activists by the KU Klux Klan in Mississippi goads the FBI to initiate intense investigations, from which some convictions are obtained. But the real result was the impulse given to the issue of the enfranchisement of blacks.

Paolo Matthiae excavates Ebla; eventually thousands of cuneiform tablets added much to the history of the ancient world, including the first mention of Jerusalem.

China explodes an atomic bomb.

1964-1969

Creation of PLO and rise of Arafat

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created to coordinate Palestinian international opposition to Israel (1964). Yasir (more often Yasser) Arafat, head of Fatah, an organization covered by the PLO, became its leader (1969). The PLO operated against Israel mainly from Jordan. Palestinian terrorist operations, which the PLO never actually claimed, were against Israel but they also were carried out internationally.

1964-1973

Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig hypothesize the existence of quarks, the energy equivalents of the structure of atoms. Electrons and protons are constituted by quarks. By then it had been accepted that particles could not be in identical quantum states, but quarks seemed to violate this principle. The problem was solved with a color analogy, expressed mathematically of course, through which quantum properties result in specificities at the basic level of matter constituted by quarks. From quarks its was theorized that gluons are the strong force that keeps them together and in fact makes atomic bonds stronger in proportion to distance (the reverse of gravity). Gluons are the equivalents of the photons which transmit electromagnetic forces. What are so far unfound for a general theory of matter are gravitons. From 1967 to 1973, Henry W. Kendall, Richard E. Taylor, and Jerome I Friedman discovered the quark. They shared the Nobel for physics in 1990. Gell-Mann had won the Noble prize in 1969. His main area of research was the classification of subatomic particles.

1966

Soviet Luna 9 lands on moon.

US Surveyor I lands on moon.

First Chinese thermonuclear bomb.

1966-1971

The Great Cultural Revolution

In 1964, China became an atomic power, which must have been a boost to Mao's sense of infallibility. All these influences came together in 1966 with the launching of the Cultural Revolution which was an incitation to the young and the ignorant to think of themselves as righteous agents of social revolution. If the Great Leap Forward was an economic disaster, the Cultural Revolution provoked an overturning of responsible authority, under Red Army over-all supervision, and a huge educational retrogression. The competent and level-headed communist leader Deng Xiaoping was made to wear a dunce cap. Mao was not irrational enough not to see that his Cultural Revolution unchecked would lead to chaos and in 1971 he started to backtrack.

1967

C. Baarnard does the first heart transplant.

The ECSC (1951), the EEC (1957), and Euroatom are fused.

Six-Day war

When Nasser brushed aside the UN forces and occupied the Sinai threatening to choke the access to the Israeli port of Elath in the gulf of Aqaba, Israel struck. In the Arab-Israeli (Six-Day) war of 1967, Israel occupied Sinai, the Gaza strip, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and the Golan heights, an outstanding victory that is attributed to Moshe Dayan, whose attitude towards the conquered Palestinian territories afterwards was to meddle as little as possible in their affairs.

late 1960s

China might have been giving nuclear warhead designs to Pakistan. Both countries had in common their enmity with India.

1968-1976

In Portugal, the dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar is incapacitated (he vegetated until 1970). His last store-minder, Marcelo Caetano, was too slow in introducing reforms and in 1974 he was overthrown in the radical Captains' Revolution, which used Gen. Antonio de Spinola as a front and the rest of the armed forces were not opposed. In 1975, decolonization was accomplished in record time, too fast some argue thinking of East Timor which was practically thrown to the tender mercies of Indonesia. When the officers tried to revolutionize Portugal, they were displaced and arrested in 1976.

1969

Neil Armstrong lands on the moon in the Apollo 11 mission. In all, there were eight moon landings and seventeen Apollo launchings.

1969-1993

SALT and START

The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) refer to two rounds of bilateral talks and corresponding international treaties between the Soviet Union and United States, the Cold War superpowers, on the issue of armament control. SALT I and SALT II. Negotiations started in Helsinki, Finland, in 1969 between the United States and the Soviet Union to limit the countries' stock of nuclear weapons. The treaties resulting from these negotiations are called SALT I and SALT II. These treaties have led to START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). START I (a 1991 agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union) and START II (a 1993 agreement between the United States and Russia) placed specific caps on each side's stock of nuclear weapons.

1969-1982

The American Advanced Research Projects Agency financed the creation of the first rudimentary internet by which information could be interchanged between academic institutions and the government, especially its defense branch. In 1980, the internet was expanded and made available on a paying basis to research centers. In 1982 it was enhanced with a set of communication protocols (TCP/IP).

1970

First Chinese satellite launched.

1970-1971

Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands agree to build centrifuges for atomic energy, which leads to the formation in 1971 of the Uranium Enrichment Company (Urenco).

1970-1973

Chile

In 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende Goosens was elected to the presidency of Chile. This was the first time in history that a genuinely revolutionary government, in the sense of openly Marxist, gained power through the ballot box and without external interference. The performance of the economy under the Popular Unity government is a matter of debate, but nationalizations did not increase productivity and external capital flows stopped. The American administration of Richard Nixon allowed the CIA to conspire practically in the open against Allende. The middle classes turned against the government and the usually reactionary military staged a textbook coup d'état led by the minister of war, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, about whom Allende had no suspicions. Allende was killed resisting in the presidential palace (1973).

1970-1971

Bangladesh

In elections in 1970, the Awami League won by a landslide in east Pakistan, which gave it an over-all majority in the national assembly. President Yahya Khan sent troops to the east. The Awami League set up headquarters in Calcutta. In Chittagong major Zia ur-Rahman resisted the regular army. Millions began to flee the country and an alarmed India invaded in December 1971. There was only feeble Pakistani resistance and Bangladesh came into existence under Mujibur, who offered a secular state.

1970-1974

The microprocessor (CPU) is invented and developed.

1971-1979

China and the USA

China's relations with the USSR worsened—frontier clashes in 1969—but its relations with the USA turned towards normalization with the visit of Henry Kissinger to Beijing in 1971, a move encouraged by Zhou Enlai. In the UN, the Taiwan delegation was replaced by that of the People's Republic of China. President Richard Nixon followed Kissinger in 1972 and China and the USA exchanged diplomatic missions. Full reciprocal recognition was carried out in 1979 during the administration of president Jimmy Carter.

1971-1994

Black holes, also known as singularities or points of infinite density, were predicated from a combination of Einstein's general theory of relativity and the laws of gravity or Newtonian mechanics. The existence of a blackhole was first suspected in a binary star system in the constellation Cygnus in which a giant star circles around another unseen star, possibly a black hole. The Hubble telescope transmitted almost certain evidence of a black hole in 1994.

1972

R. Leakey and G. Isaac find a 2.5 million year-old hominid skull.

World Heritage Convention created in the UN.

EEC and EFTA establish free trade among their members.

MAD (mutually assured destruction) became "official" with the signing of the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM).

1972-1975

The Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, an expert in metallurgy, works for Urenco in Holland and obtains plans for centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapon-making quality.

1973

Xerox engineers design the first personal computer.

Herbert Boyer invents the recombinant DNA technique.

The UK, Denmark, and Ireland join the EC.

1973-1981

Egypt and Israel

Nasser was succeeded by vicepresident Gen. Anwar al-Sadat, who made it his task to recover the Sinai. In 1971, Egypt, which was still officially the UAR, was renamed the Arab Republic of Egypt. In 1973, Egypt, in alliance with Syria, attacked Israel. Egyptian forces crossed the Suez canal successfully. They held a line in the Sinai but did not advance and Israel, quickly resupplied by the United States, counter-attacked. The Egyptians apparently resisted in the city of Suez, which was destroyed, but their encircled forces surrendered. Israel retained the Golan Heights. Disengagement treaties were signed in 1974 and 1975 that returned the Suez canal to Egypt.

            Sadat had come around to the view that Israel was there to stay. The climate for negotiations was not good and Egyptian peace feelers to Israel did not make much of an impression on primer minister Golda Meir (1969-1974) nor on her successor Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977). But Sadat, whose country had suffered more territorial losses than any Arab state in its struggle with Israel, persisted. In exchange for recovery of the Sinai, Egypt was willing to recognize Israel in a peace accord. Menachem Begin, of the right-wing, hawk-like Likud Party, became prime minister, and it was this Jewish ex-terrorist who could not in good conscience oppose Egypt's peace offensive, dramatized by Sadat's what-more-can-you-want trip to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. Peace negotiations culminated in the Camp David Accord (1978-1979) with the full backing of president Jimmy Carter. Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.

            Braving the ire of militant anti-Israeli Arabs, including strong clandestine opposition in Egypt itself, Sadat extended full recognition to Israel, which evacuated the Sinai and some enclaves on the Egyptian Red Sea coast. He paid for this with his life when he was assassinated in 1981 by fanatical soldiers during a military parade before a world television audience. His killers, led by Lt. Khalid Islambouli, were members of the Islamic Jihad, a fanatical organization founded by the Egyptian physician Ayman Zawahiri, who has been linked to Osama bin Laden. His killer was observed when he looked behind the reviewing stand to make sure Sadat was dead and fired another burst. Sadat's successor, president Hosni Mubarak, rounded up the Islamic Jihad—who later recurred to "tourist terrorism" (attack on Deir el-Bahri in the Luxor area in 1996)—and stuck by the peace terms with Israel.

Oil crisis

When the Egyptian invasion of the Sinai failed (1973), Saudi Arabia imposed a world-wide oil embargo or boycott, which sent prices, which had previously been hovering around $4 per barrel, to over $20, which is the median where they remained until 2003.

1974

Qing Shi Huangdi's mausoleum excavated in China.

SALT I in Vladivostok: the USA and the USSR agree to reduce their ballistic forces to 2400 missiles, of which 1320 MIRVs (Multiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicles).

India explodes a nuclear device.

1974-1993

Ethiopia and Eritrea

The Ethiopian armed forces became mutinous and under Mengistu Haile Mariam overthrew Haile Selasie in 1974. The governing Coordinating Committee, known as DERG, proclaimed socialism and sought Soviet aid. The USSR did a flip-flop and started supporting Ethiopia against Somalia. Acting for the Soviets, Cuban troops were instrumental in re-attaching the Ogaden to Ethiopia. Economic failure and ethnic discontents, produced rebellions in the 1980s. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front had beaten the Ethiopian army in the interior of Eritrea by 1988. Similar success accompanied the insurrection of the Tigray People's Liberation Front. Mariam called for more Soviet aid, which dried up in 1989. Ethiopian rebel armies jointly formed the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. In 1990 the port of Massawa fell and Mariam fled the country in 1991. The union with Eritrea dissolved in 1993.

1975

Apollo and Soyuz link up in space.

In the Helsinki summit, 35 nations agree on respecting existing European borders and on human rights.

1975-2001

Angola

Starting in 1974, Portugal underwent a revolutionary process and in 1975 it granted Angola independence. Some observers say that independence was imposed—there were 500,000 Portuguese-descended residents of Angola then—but there existed various rebel independence movements in the territory. The two most important were the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The leftist MPLA captured the capital Lunda and has been the official government of Angola since independence. However, UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, obtained support in the USA and in South Africa. During the 1980s, there was an alliance between Savimbi and South Africa against Jose Eduardo Santos, the leader of MPLA and president of Angola (since 1979), allied to the USRR and Fidel Castro's Cuba. The Cubans won a significant victory at Cuito Canavale in central Angola. UN-sponsored negotiations led to Cuban evacuation in 1989 and in 1994 to a tentative agreement between Lunda and UNITA, which was broken by Savimbi the following year. By then South Africa had jettisoned apartheid, the MPLA had moderated its radicalism, and Savimbi had little support apart from his small guerrilla forces. In 1998, Angola was helping to sustain the government of Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Angola has an oil-rich enclave called Cabinda north of the mouth of the Congo River. In 2000, more oil was discovered offshore. With American intelligence assistance, the Angolan army had almost destroyed the UNITA rebels. Savimbi's death in 2001 contributed further to the stabilization of the situation in Angola.

1975-1991

The Lebanese Civil War

In 1975, the internal fractures in Lebanon resulted in outright civil war between the PLO, backed by the Druze Jumblatt clan, and the Christian core of the Lebanese army. This conflict, in which the participants increased as the fighting went on, lasted on and off until 1991. As a rule, it pitted Muslims and Druzes against Christians, but towards its final years it degenerated into fighting between Christian factions and between Muslim militias. The Druzes and the Palestinians were usually allies in the fighting, perhaps because their territories were not contiguous. Much of this mayhem was orchestrated by Syria, which first joined the civil war in 1976 and very gradually imposed its authority in Lebanon and finally pacified the country, although its methods were often underhand and savage. Throughout the process the Syrian president was Hafez al-Assad.

            The Lebanese civil war did not have a clearly demarcated frontline, except in Beirut, and it shifted from one part of the country to another, whenever fighting erupted between the different communities, especially between Muslims and Christians. One of the early theaters of the civil war was the fighting in the north between Muslim Tripoli and Maronite Zgharta.

            During the early part of 1976, just prior to the Syrian intervention, the Lebanese army dwindled to its Maronite nucleus and the communities started self-segregating from the others. This process of self-segregation also affected the divisions among Muslims between Shia (mostly in southern Lebanon), Sunni, and Druzes. Beirut was divided into Muslim west Beirut and Maronite east Beirut. Allenby street was the no man's land between them, known as the "green line" because no one could venture into it without risk of life and it soon became overgrown with vegetation.

            At the start of the war the PLO and allies had over 20,000 soldiers against a lesser number on the side of the Maronites. The official army itself was so weak that it was complemented by a Christian militia known as the Lebanese Forces (LF). Consequently, there existed the very real possibility that all of Lebanon could fall to the PLO. The Syrian intervention has been attributed to an appeal from president Suleyman Franjieh, a Maronite, but it is more likely that the Syrians intervened because if the PLO had triumphed Israel would have invaded putting Syria at further military disadvantage. In general, it can be speculated that a PLO victory would have embattled the Near East further than it already was.

            The Maronites certainly did not object to the Syrian invasion, which was at first extremely cautious and limited to the Bekaa valley between Beirut and Damascus. The PLO stopped its advances and placed a wary eye on Syria. The Syrian invasion grew bolder and by November it had taken over much of Muslim Lebanon, including especially west Beirut and Tripoli.

            Israel responded by setting the Litani river as the limit whose crossing by the Syrians could provoke Israeli intervention (depending on various other strategic concerns). The Litani river lies south of Beirut between Sidon and Tyre. Inland it runs through the Bekaa valley. And indeed in 1978, when Palestinians landed in Haifa and commandeered a bus killing 37 civilians, Israel invaded southern Lebanon with 25,000 soldiers as far as the Litani river.

            The Israeli withdrawal left behind (1) the largely Christian Southern Lebanon Army (originally The Free Lebanon Army), sponsored, advised, and weaponed by Israel in the region as far north as Tyre, and (2) just north of the Israeli border, the 6,000-man UN force called Unifil. The SLA and Unifil co-existed side by side. Unifil was supposed to disarm anti-Israeli commandos but it was largely ineffectual.

            The ayatollahs came to power in Iran in 1979 and they sponsored Shia militias and Hizbollah, a political front which badly dissimulated its militant and terrorist stance. The militant Shia organizations included principally Amal and Islamic Jihad.

            Not wanting to take casualties, Syria held Lebanon almost gingerly. Overt fighting all over the country was common, reciprocal antagonisms were constant. In 1981, Syria began to flex its muscles in Lebanon by first installing SAMs in the Bekaa valley, which obviously were meant to deter Israel. At the same time, fighting between the PLO and Israel in southern Lebanon, but overlapping into Galilee (northern Israel), was taking on the character of a small war.

            It was as a result of these circumstances that in June 1982, under the supervision of Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, Israel launched its full-scale invasion of Lebanon designated Operation Peace for Galilee including the destruction of Syrian missile sites in Bekaa. Syria rose to the challenge with its air force which was engaged by the Israelis in a gigantic dogfight covering 2,500 square kilometers and involving hundreds of supersonic fighters on both sides. The Syrians lost 90 aircraft. Their air forces were shattered.

            The Israeli army, known as the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), advanced to west Beirut which was put to siege. As the Israeli objective was to eliminate the PLO in Lebanon, a multinational force (MNF)—American, French, and Italian troops amounting to two brigades—was allowed to land in Lebanon in August and evacuate thousand of Palestinians to Syria and Cyprus.

            Bashir Gemayel, the Maronite "official president" of Lebanon, who was blamed for Israel's invasion, was assassinated by Palestinians. He was succeeded by his brother Amin. Despite the PLO evacuation, there remained in West Beirut the camps of Palestinian refugees, and these were bristling with resentment and arms.

            The IDF occupied west Beirut. The Falangists were a powerful Maronite militia and they went at dayfall into the crowded Sabra and Shatilla refugee areas. The Israelis provided flares and observed operations from nearby buildings. At dawn it was found that the Falangists had left behind a massacre of civilians, including children, which is usually estimated at between 800 and 1,000 victims. The Falangist leader Elie Hobeika was blamed for the slaughter, although he himself later denied that he was anywhere near the camps. The killings must also be put in the context of innumerable atrocities committed by all sides wherever there was fighting in Lebanon.

            Sharon was forced to resign the defense ministry although not from the cabinet, then headed by primer minister Menachem Beguin. When Belgium approved an universal human rights law, Sharon was accused before a Belgian tribunal. Israel disparaged the proceedings and Belgium later amended the law so as to apply only to Belgian nationals. Hobeika was killed in an explosion in 2002.

            Israel had taken hundreds of casualties, and they kept mounting, so another MNF, composed as the previous one, was sent in to separate Israelis and Lebanese. At first, hopes were pinned on peace for Lebanon through the MNF (unrealistic considering its small size), but soon Muslims began to see Americans again as the enemy because of its key alliance with Israel.

            In April 1983, a van loaded with explosives was crashed into the American Embassy causing 63 dead including seventeen Americans. The deed was claimed by the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad.

            Arafat was feeling pressure from the Syrians for not having ordered the PLO to fight to the death in Beirut and he left his Damascus offices for Tunisia. By July, Syria was stepping up its efforts to get things in hand in Lebanon. This highly devious and bloody process would take nine years.

            It began with the formation of a National Salvation Front (NSF). Lebanese president Gemayel was tacitly accepted, although the parties to the front (Muslims and Druzes) and Syria itself controlled much more of Lebanon than he did. Syria encouraged a scission within the PLO—the Abu Musa faction—and fomented aggression against loyalists of Arafat.

            By September 1983, the IDF began phasing down its occupation of Lebanon, first out of Beirut and south to Sidon. Fighting between Druzes and Christians was at its most intense from this period until 1984.

            On 23 October 1983, a terrorist drove a truck around in circles inside a parking area in front of the USA barracks in southern Beirut. He was gathering impulse for a dash against the American military compound. The heavy vehicle crashed and smashed its way over various obstacles and was detonated next to the barracks. The detonation, which has been called the "single largest non-nuclear explosion" in history, killed 241 USA servicemen (mostly Marines). Shortly afterwards a lesser explosion devastated the French barracks producing 58 military casualties. Syria is thought to have a hand in both attacks, in part because of the sophistication of the bomb targeting the American troops. In November, under constant Syrian pressure Arafat's remaining PLO troops were evacuated from Tripoli to North Yemen, Tunisia, and Algeria in Greek ships with a French naval escort.

            In February 1984, Shiites went on the offensive against Christian east Beirut, and the green line, which was being crossed as a result of the MNF and the NSF, was drawn again. The MNF threw in the towel that month. As part of its maneuvers to subject Lebanon, Syria also fomented fighting in west Beirut between non-Christian militias which it had itself armed. In September, the USA embassy annex, where the embassy still functioned, was bombed with 24 dead including two USA soldiers. Maronite factions fell to jockeying and occasionally fighting against each other.

            In February 1985, the IDF fell back from Sidon, quickly occupied by Shia militias, to Tyre. In March, the Israelis created the security zone (ten kilometers north of the border) which it left to be policed by the SLA, led by Maj. Saad Haddad. In April, even as the Maronites were engaged in internal power struggles, they were also fighting off Muslims.

            In December, it was the warlords turn to try to engineer a truce: Walid Jumblatt of the Druzes, Nabih Berri of Amal (Shiites), and Hobeika of the Maronite LF. The Sunni Muslims of Lebanon never quite managed to put together an effective militia. Their militia at the start of the civil war, al-Murabitum (the name of the historical Almoravids), was a Palestinian front.

            Basically it was Syria calling the shots—Hobeika was considered pro-Syria—and in July 1986 it started taking over Beirut, where it would meet Christian resistance. In February 1987, the Druzes and the Shiites began fighting their own civil war in Beirut with T-54 tanks previously provided by Syria. It was heavy combat, the crowning blow to Beirut's devastation, and the militias only achieved their own weakening.

            Syrian troops advanced south to Sidon without Israeli objections, for it was becoming evident to observers that Syrian overlordship was the only hope for stability in Lebanon. Ironically, the interests of Syria, Israel's implacable enemy, and Israel were converging, although this wasn't the first time this happened in Lebanon's crazy-quilt civil war. However, the Maronites still cherished the obsolete dream of the old French-sponsored Lebanon and were hardening towards Syria. By mid-1987, Unifil had suffered 139 casualties and France withdrew from it.

            In 1989, the Syrian-backed René Mowad, another Maronite, succeeded Gen. Michel Aoun, provisional president only since the expiration of Amin Gemayel's term the previous year. Mowad was assassinated and Elias Hrawi took his place. In September, Aoun was leading the Christian opposition to Syrian plans.

            In October, in Saudi Arabia, the Taif Accord gave general though not unanimous backing to Syria's hand in Lebanon. Some Maronites too saw Syria as inevitable and the LF militia partly turned against Aoun. In early 1990, Aoun was fending off his LF enemies. By the end of the year, the USA augmented the chorus for Syria, especially as Syria sent a contingent to participate in the UN-sanctioned, USA-led Gulf War against Iraq for its annexation of Kuwait. In May 1991, Syria disbanded and disarmed the militias, except Amal and Hizbollah in the south engaged in confrontation with Israel and its proxy SLA.

            Hostage-taking of westerners had become a commonplace activity of the militias since the mid-1988s. Some hostages were held captive for years, moved from one hideout to another in Beirut. Now all remaining hostages were released. In August, Syria sanctioned a parliament in which Christians and Muslims were evenly represented. Gen. Aoun surrendered in October.

1976

The European super-sonic Concorde enters service. After a traumatic fatal accident in France (July 2000), service ended in 2003.

It is argued that spray cans affect the ozone layer

Pakistan inaugurates the Kahuta nuclear enrichment plant directed by Abdul Qadeer Khan.

1976-1983

“Dirty war” and Falklands war

In Argentina, the social situation was deteriorating and the military returned to power in 1976 naming Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla as president, under whom began the guerra sucia (dirty war) to eliminate leftist opposition by torture and killing. Some 14,000 to 30,000 persons are believed to have been its victims. Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a sculptor, became the most outspoken enemy of the dirty war for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980. As the dirty war wound down, then president Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri ordered the invasion of the Falklands (Malvinas) and South Georgia (1982), which was defeated by a large British task force. Raul Alfonsín, elected president in 1983, initiated legal actions against the military who carried out the dirty war, including former presidents, but mostly they concluded with amnesties and pardons.

1976-1993

Death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping

Mao died in 1976 and was succeeded by Hua Guofeng, a supporter of the discredited Cultural Revolution. At the head of a military committee through which he had supreme though not absolute power, Deng Xiaoping went on the offensive. For the sake of communist legitimacy and continuity, he blamed the Cultural Revolution on the Gang of Four. However, Mao's widow scotched any illusions about her husband by claiming in high-pitch at her trial that nothing moved in China without Mao's willing it. Hua Guofeng was out by 1981 and China had embarked on a rectification campaign in which party secretary general Hu Yaobang represented the most liberal tendency. Southern China, especially the province of Quangdong and its capital Quangzhou, experienced extraordinary development through their exceptional economic status. Economic growth was so vertiginous that between Hong Kong and Quangzhou there sprouted practically overnight a million-plus metropolis named Shenzhen. The old Shanghai Bund, once a symbol of modernity, is today reduced to midgethood next to the whimsical high-rises of Pudong, a truly mammoth extension of Shanghai across the Huangpu (Whangpo) river. Shanghai is believed to have a population of 20 million, although this estimate includes unregistered migrants looking for work.

            The much less repressive post-Mao climate engendered democratic hopes. Hu Yaobang's lenient attitude provoked his removal in 1987. He was replaced by the even more liberal Zhao Ziyang. Upon Hu Yaobang's natural death, political protests, led by students, culminated in a huge rally in Tiananmen Square, the center of Beijing (1989). Zhao Ziyang favored a tolerant policy and was ousted. Troops and tanks intervened causing a massacre. Then prime minister Li Peng took most of the blame for this. China would go the way of reforms but at its own communist-party determined pace and for the foreseeable future there was to be no democracy, much less of the sort that in Russia begat savage, gangster-infected capitalism. Market reforms were approved in 1993. In an article in 2004, Li Peng wrote than the decision to repress the Tiananmen protests was Deng Xiaoping's.

1977

The complete genetic structure of a living being (a virus) is formulated.

1978

The first in vitro fertilization is accomplished in Great Britain.

John Paul II, formerly a Polish cardinal, is chosen to be pope. A compassionate, very conservative man, he opposes abortion resolutely.

1979

The Americans Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow and the Pakistani Abdus Salam share the Nobel prize in physics for work on electromagnetic and atomic forces at high pressures.

The European Monetary System (EMS) is created contemplating the ECU (European currency unit), eventually the Euro.

In the Vienna Summit, the SALT II establish new limits on delivery systems of nuclear weapons.

1979-1981

Iran

Reza Shah was sincerely devoted to the modernization of Iran, but as he became comfortable with power he tended to exercise it despotically. As often happens in such situations, people were affronted by the ostentation of those who benefit in a newly rich nation. There was Shia Islamic opposition to the secularism of the royal government. It was led by the ayatollah (sign of God) Ruhollah Khomeini, who was first exiled in Turkey and Iraq and, after Saddam Hussein expelled him, lived in Paris from where his taped exhortations against the regime were widely listened in Iran. The rest of the world knew little of him and there was general surprise when in 1979 Reza Shah lost authority in the country he ruled with a fist of iron and a theocratic, fundamentalist revolution carried Khomeini to absolute power. Khomeini was so anti-American that the habitual name for the USA in Iran became "satan". He encouraged the take-over of the US Embassy, whose personnel (66 persons) was held hostage by Islamic guards in retaliation for the American visa granted to the former shah for health reasons and later cancelled. A botched attempt to rescue the hostages probably cost president Jimmy Carter the election in 1980. The hostages were finally released early in 1981 after the shah's death in Egypt the previous year.

1979-1989

Soviet occupation of Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, the radical Babrak Karmal fled to the USSR, which, at his behest, invaded Afghanistan (December 1979). Karmal became nominal head of government, that is, a Soviet puppet. While America wallowed in impotent anger over the Iranian sequestration of its diplomats, the Soviets, led by secretary general Leonid Brezhnev, seemed to have effortlessly added another satellite to their empire. What no one could foresee at the time was that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did not constitute a strategic victory for the Soviets but the last twist to their own hangman's knot. American president Jimmy Carter's reaction was immediate. Condemnation of the invasion was forceful and unequivocal, disarmament negotiations with the USSR were suspended (although Washington and Moscow announced separately that they would abide by the results achieved), relations fell to the coldest of Cold War temperatures. The USA refused point blank to participate in the Summer Olympics, which in 1980 were celebrated in Moscow. With unstinting CIA aid and Pakistani complicity, divided but fanatical Islamic resistance movements (mujahidin) inflicted heavy losses on the Soviets who abandoned the fight in 1988-89 after suffering between 15,000 and 20,000 casualties out of a more or less constant invasion force of 100,000 men.

1979-1993

Israeli settlements and First Intifada

Ever since the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel had been establishing settlements in Arab lands. This policy was low-key and discreet but after Begin's election (1979) it took off with the constant encouragement and support of Sharon. Palestinians in the occupied territories were smoldering about Israeli encroachment and in 1987 they staged a mostly stone-throwing insurrection, called the Intifada (shaking off), that Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defense, ordered crushed expeditiously and with barely restrained use of force, although resistance and sporadic violence went on until 1993.

1980s

South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan constitute the group of the so-called Asian Tigers, the first highly developed economies to emerge so far from a condition of economic underdevelopment.

1980

Big Bang theory suffered from the defect that gravity would have sucked in the primeval explosion preventing the creation of the universe. The physicist Alan Guth proposed an additional super-blast, called "inflation", to remedy that problem. "Ripples" during inflation would have created our universe. Inflation theory also included a "flat" universe, neither expanding nor contracting. Additionally, there was nothing in the theory to preclude further inflations forming sequential/parallel universes. Even though there has been some experimental evidence for parts of inflation, Guth has not been awarded the Nobel prize for physics.

Smallpox is declared eradicated.

The asteroid-impact theory on the extinction of the dinosaurs is proposed.

Lech Wavensa promotes the Solidarity labor union movement in Gdanks, Poland, against the opposition of the communist Polish government.

1980-1988

Iraq-Iran war

In 1979, Saddam Hussein assumed full dictatorial powers with the resignation of al-Bakr. The same year the ayatollahs' regime was established in Iran. With the Shia revolution in Iran in full swing, Baghdad feared that its own substantial Shia population might grow restive. There were also border clashes between the two countries. To settle the outstanding issues between them, Hussein ordered all-out war in 1980 with financial backing from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The war front moved back and forth. However, by 1982 the Iranians were winning the war and the American administration of president Ronald Reagan, fearful of Iranian subversion in the Middle East and in Arabia, opted for a policy of full though unannounced support for Saddam Hussein.

            The USA established diplomatic relations with Baghdad and, even though it was known that Iraq was using chemical weapons, American satellite information on Iranian troop deployments was passed on to Iraq as the lesser of two evils. Even so, in 1988 the Iranians captured the Kurdish Iraqi town of Halabjah and were on the road to Kirkuk. The Iraqis counter-attacked and Hussein dealt with the Kurdish problem in summary fashion by the use of poison gas which left 5,000 civilians dead in Halabjah. The actual order to use gas was imparted by a cousin of Hussein, Gen. Ali Hassan al Majeed (or Majid), who thus earned for himself the sobriquet of "Chemical Ali". In the end, after huge casualties on both sides, a cease fire was agreed in 1988 on UN terms and the situation returned to basically the status quo ante bellum.

1981

IBM markets the first personal computers.

Columbia shuttle is launched.

The acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is discovered.

Greece joins the EEC.

1983

The CERN accelerator in Geneva is used to demonstrate that at high energy levels the electromagnetic and the weak-atomic forces are identical. This is called the electro-weak force.

Kary Mullis invents the polymerase chain reaction, used for the application of DNA in medicine, in forensic analysis, in paleontology, and in DNA sequencing.

1982-1991

From Brezhnev to Gorbachev

A doddering Brezhnev finally was pronounced dead in 1982. He was succeeded by Yury Andropov, head of the secret police, who died in 1984. After a brief period under the aging Constantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev became secretary general of the Communist party (1985).

            Gorbachev, an open-minded protegé of Andropov, came to power and from the start he showed not only a willingness to liberalize the Soviet regime but a desire to put an end to the Cold War. American President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev got along famously at a meeting in Reyjavik, Iceland—Gorbachev also charmed the British Prime Minister Margaret "Iron Lady" Thatcher—and the resulting Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) became a means for furthering lessening the antagonism between the two super-powers (1986).

            Gorbachev's approach to nuclear issues was influenced by the catastrophic meltdown (uncontrolled chain-reaction) in the core of the Chernobyl plant (1986), the worst accident in the history of atomic-power generation, as well as a palpable sign of the inefficiency of the communist system. The effects of Chernobyl, which, according to some estimates, released 40 times as much radioactive energy as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs together, are still being felt. Although not in the form of an atomic mushroom, the explosion blew off the steel ceiling of the plant. Soviet engineers first covered part of the Chernobyl plant in a concrete "sarcophagus", which has been allowing leakages leading to plans for a huge arch of steel, twelve meters thick and one hundred meters high, to be slid over plates to cover the gigantic, radiating pile of twisted steel, concrete, debris, and dust.

            The elimination of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which had been proposed by the United States and rejected by Brezhnev, was accepted by Gorbachev. Nuclear terror was circumscribed by the MAD equilibrium with now the substantial difference that America and the USSR were no longer on a fully adversarial footing.

            At the beginning of 1989 the world was still bi-polar and the USSR was far from an open, democratic society. In the course of the year, Soviet forces evacuated Afghanistan. With glasnost Gorbachev had started changing the secretive, repressive nature of Soviet society. Political events that affected communism began happening at a rate so vertiginous that Sovietologists (also called Kremlinologists) and other pundits were left in a state of hopeless bafflement.

            The Soviet empire started to disintegrate when a non-communist prime minister was chosen by the Polish Sejm. Without Soviet support, the long-time communist boss of East Germany, Erich Honecker, was toppled and the Berlin Wall was exultantly dismantled. The Hungarian communist party had previously dissolved itself. Bulgaria entered a period of unrest which resulted in its de-communization. Riots in Czechoslovakia were put down and for a time it seemed as if the most audaciously liberalizing of the communist satellites would resist the anti-communist surge, but then, literally from one day to the next, the country simply dropped communism altogether. The last hold-outs were Nicholas Ceausescu and his wife, who jointly ruled Romania like a family property, and other communists assassinated the terrified couple.

            In 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Gorbachev, whose reforms were known as perestroika, was not fully against communist rule in the USSR. For one thing, he did not believe in a pen-stroke transition from a command economy to capitalism. For another, he did not even envision the dissolution of the USSR. He might have had in mind something along the lines of very gradual economic reform in a semi-democratic context. But his communist comrades sabotaged his plans when they sequestered him on a trip he made to the Crimea and on Soviet television announced they were taking over (1991).

            The hands of the leader of the coup, Dmitri Yazov, were shaking so badly when he made the announcement that it was hard to take the conspirators seriously. Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Soviet Federated Republic, a hard-drinking opportunist who favored perestroika, took charge in Gorbachev's absence, rallied opposition to the coup, and had the plotters arrested.

            Gorbachev was restored to the presidency of the USSR. He had been intending to grant greater autonomy to the Soviet republics, but these now saw an opportunity to become totally independent. In March of 1990 Lithuania had declared its independence but Soviet forces had intervened. A few days after the failed coup, Yeltsin recognized the independence of the Baltic states and this was followed by the secession of all the other Soviet republics. Thus the Soviet fiction of a federation of sovereign states became a reality to the detriment of what was the largest land empire in history. Considering this huge loss of territory—probably the largest in history—Russia, officially the Russian Federation (because it still includes many non-Russian minorities), has taken it remarkably well.

            In December 1991, so as to retain some links from the former Soviet federal past, but behind Gorbachev's back, the republics of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus founded in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Gorbachev found himself president of nothing and he resigned on 25 December 1991, grumbling that Yeltsin, his erstwhile ally, had betrayed him. In the space of a few days, the United States had won the Cold War and the world had ceased being bi-polar and had become unipolar.

1984

String theory is proposed as a purely theoretical, highly complex mathematical means to an unified field for the forces of nature: the strong nuclear force (which holds the atom together), electromagnetic waves, gravity, and the weak nuclear force (radioactivity).

In perhaps the most lethal industrial accident in history, 45 tons of the extremely toxic gas methyl isocyanate, used for insecticides, blew off from a Dow Jones plan in Bhopal, India, killing an estimated 2500 but leaving in its wake many more persons affected in many ways, some lethal. Faulty procedures were blamed and the Indian government asked from billions of dollars in compensation but settled for less than $500 million, although the case is still open.

Independence of Zimbabwe

1985

Ozone hole over Antarctica is discovered.

Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, steers in the European parliament in Strasbourg the Single European Act. In the Schengen agreement free circulation within the EEC is sanctioned.

ca1985-ca1995

The Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan organized a nuclear proliferation network, which had been supplying nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea.

1986

The Single European Act, which modifies towards greater union the Treaty of Rome (1957), is signed in Luxembourg.
Portugal and Spain join the EEC.

ca1987

Pakistan might have been selling centrifuges for Uranium-enrichment to Iran.

1987

Evidence from genetic studies suggests that the last common female ancestor of the homo genus lived in Africa less than 200,000 years ago (since modified to about 150,000).

The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) is signed by the USA and the USSR. It eliminated all missiles in the 500 to 5,000 kms. ranges, including in particular the Soviet SS-20s and the American Pershings.

1988-1994

Nagorno-Karabakh war

Nagorno-Karabakh had been an autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaijan in which Armenians were a majority. Even before the collapse of the USSR, there was fighting within the region between Armenians and Azeris, and pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijan. War over Nagorno-Karabakh broke out in earnest in 1991. In 1992, the Armenians had made a corridor between itself to Nagorno-Karabakh. Fighting went on and by the time a truce was agreed in 1994, Armenians were occupying territory in Azerbaijan adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh.

1988-1995

Arafat recognizes Israel and Oslo accords

While attitudes in Israel hardened, Arafat and the PLO were gaining international respectability, especially American informal recognition when Arafat acknowledged the legitimacy of the state of Israel and offered to end PLO military operations (1988). Arafat was angling now for the recognition of the right of Palestinians to a state of their own. He stumbled badly when he supported Saddam Hussein's unprovoked invasion of Kuwait resulting in the crushing of Iraq during the Gulf War (1991), but nonetheless talks between Israel and the Palestinians began that year.

            Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister in 1992 in agreement with Shimon Peres, his foreign minister, about the advisability of dealing with Arafat and the PLO to achieve a peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem. Peres initiated the Oslo negotiations. An interim agreement had been reached by September 1993 and an effusive Arafat shook hands with a reticent Rabin as president Bill Clinton stood by smiling in the White House lawn. The final agreement, known as the Oslo Accords, involved Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank (Palestinian Authority) over a period of five years. Peres, Rabin, and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

            There existed unresolved problems. Hebron, a city where some hundred Jews were entrenched in the midst of 100,000 Palestinians, got the most coverage, but in truth hostility between Israelis and Palestinians was on the rise. Hamas, a Palestinian organization that Israel once considered as a possible rival to the PLO, turned to terrorism, and Jewish fanatics, many from Brooklyn, followers of Meir Kahane, took reprisals. Arafat's policy of trying to co-opt Hamas rather than applying mass arrests was seen by Israel as temporizing with terrorism.

            Rabin was killed at a party rally by a Jewish fanatic (1995). Peres called for elections in which he expected to get backing for the continuation of a peace policy, but the Israeli electorate instead opted for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was defiantly against the Oslo Accords. Their implementation came to a halt.

1989-1993

At the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee and Roger Caillau invent the www for general use. Basically, it consisted in a protocol language called hypertext (html) which facilitated and expanded the use of the internet. In 1993, Marc Andreessen developed the first browser.

Evidence that the universe is expanding (low density) has a negative impact on Big Bang theory and its complement, inflation theory. Dark matter is usually alleged to explain why the components of the universe are not more dispersed than they are. Big Bang theorists take refuge in Einstein's purely theoretical cosmological constant to defend the hypothesis that the universe is stable, neither expanding nor contracting. The window for stability is so narrow that it seemed unlikely to Einstein and he apparently feared contraction more than expansion.

Carbon-14 dated charred remains in Monte Verde, Chile, permit assuming that the peopling of the Americas occurred over 17,000 years ago, more than was previously thought.

The tomb of the Lord of Sipán (coast north of Lima, Perú) excavated.

The Photoshop image-editing program is designed by John Knoll.

1990

The Hubble space telescope (the size of a school bus) was launched in earth-orbit by the space shuttle Discovery. A distortion in the lens was subsequently corrected and Hubble has sent to NASA some of the most spectacular pictures of the universe, as far back as nearly the Big Bang.
Germany is reunified.

Namibia

In Namibia, there was a prolonged resistance movement and a civil war (late 1960s to 1980s) in which the native SWAPO movement was backed by Angola and Cuba (1980s) against South Africa. Agreements among all the parties led in 1990 to the independence, under UN auspices, of Namibia, presided by Sam Nujoma.

1990-1994

End of Apartheid

P.W. De Klerk (1989-1994) began to dismantle Apartheid. Mandela was freed in 1990. In 1992, the all-white electorate voted for racial equality. In 1993, De Klerk and Mandela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Mandela was elected president in 1994, at the age of 76. By then he was the world's most prestigious politician, hale and eloquent.

1990-1991

First Iraqi War

Alleging a flooding of the oil market, Iraq invaded Kuwait (2 August 1990), abolished the local regime, and proclaimed Kuwait's annexation as Iraq's 19th province. The EU and the UN Security Council voted for an oil boycott of Iraq. The Arab League and the Security Council approved measures to make the boycott stick. Led by the USA, an alliance was formed which initially included: Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Djibouti, Egypt, France, Honduras, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Oman, Pakistan, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Spain, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and West Germany. Subsequently, the following countries also joined the alliance: Argentina, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Niger, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Senegal, South Korea, and Turkey. Hussein was served notice to evacuate Kuwait by neighboring Arab states—only Jordan, for commercial reasons and out of political prudence, maintained relations with Iraq—and by the USA and the members of the alliance. On 29 November, the Security council, with China abstaining, gave Iraq until 15 January 1991 to comply. When there was no compliance, Iraq was bombarded heavily and an USA-led a multinational force of 690,000—510,000 ground troops of which all but 10,000 were Americans—easily vanquished Iraqi forces (army and reserves estimated at 1,060,000), but not before Soviet-designed Iraqi Scud rockets in the hundreds were flung at Israel and at Saudi Arabia. Resistance collapsed when a high-tech American bomb was aimed so perfectly that it penetrated the air vent of a bomb shelter for Iraqi officials and their relatives killing all its hundreds of occupants. However, American president George Bush restrained the invasion short of Baghdad and Hussein remained in power through a stronger repression of opposition than ever before.

1991

Embryos for research are produced in Great Britain.

1991-1992

The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite describes leftover microwave radiation (temperature fluctuations called "ripples") from the time when the universe was barely 300,000 years old. It is used to support inflation theory. Others, including Arno Penzias, the astrophysicist who first found signs of background "static", believe that the universe originated with insufficient mass to require inflation theory.

1991-1999

The dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian and Kosovo wars

An attempt by the Serbs to co-opt the Yugoslav presidency in 1991 led to the secession of Slovenia and Croatia. Macedonia seceded in 1992. Serbia and Montenegro formed a new Yugoslav federation. The status of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was divided into Muslim, Serbian, and Croat communities (sometimes separate, often mixed), was undetermined. When Bosnia and Herzegovina attempted to go independent under prodding from the Muslims (who constituted a small absolute majority of the population), Serbia unofficially intervened and civil war and "ethnic cleansing" followed. The fighting lasted until 1995. By the terms of the Dayton Accord, Bosnia and Herzegovina was endowed with a tri-partite government.

            In 1999, despite warnings by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to abstain from applying ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Milosevic proceeded to do so. One million Kosovars fled to Albania and Macedonia. For the first time since it was created in 1949 to counter Soviet-Stalinist military pressure in Europe, NATO acted as an unitary force led by the United States and after nearly two months of bombing, mostly of Serbia, forced the Serbian troops out of Kosovo. The refugees returned. A multinational force called KFOR runs Kosovo, which is not likely to become an effective province of Serbia in the foreseeable future, although there is no concrete talk of its independence either.

1992

Earth Summit concerns itself with ecological and conservationist questions in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Czecho-Slovakia dissolved as agreed by Czech prime minister Vaclav Klaus and Slovak prime minister Vladimir Meciar.

1992-1993

By the Maastricht treaty, ratified in 1993 by all member states, the EEC becomes the European Union (EU). The common market becomes a single market.

1992-1994

Somalia

Scourged by famine, Somalia was the object of an USA military intervention, under UN auspices, from 1992 to 1994, terminated not long after an American helicopter was downed and eighteen American soldiers were killed and mutilated in what was later described as an Al Qaida terrorist operation (1993). (See below.) After the Americans left, Somalia, whose famines, though real, were being over-reported, remained fragmented into warlordist factionalism.

1993-2000

Terrorism

During the 1990s the United States was plagued by world-wide terrorist attacks: attempt to blast the World Trade Center (WTC) foundations in New York (1993); bombing of US armed forces office building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with five dead (1995); in northeastern Saudi Arabia, nineteen killed in another US military building in Khobar, near King Abd al Aziz Air Force Base (1996); 200 dead (mostly Africans) in embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (1998); seventeen dead in a sea-borne attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbour (2000).

1994

Peter Shor, of AT&T, announces the theoretical possibility of quantum computing using electrons.

1994-1996

The rise of the Taliban

A hold-out leftist regime, headed by Gen. Mohammad Najibullah, remained in power in Kabul until 1992, when warlordism became rampant and Afghanistan seemed hopelessly fragmented. In 1994, a fundamentalist movement based in Kandahar and inspired by the ulema or mullah Mohammed Omar joined the civil war. It was named Taliban (roughly "seminarians") and it did not seem very formidable in comparison with seasoned guerrilla fighters, but it had the backing of Pakistan and attracted volunteers from other Muslim countries. The Taliban gradually took over most of Afghanistan—Kabul fell in 1996 but the north was not entirely reduced—and they instituted a regime of fanatical religious terror, beginning with the evisceration of Najibullah whose corpse was put on display in Kabul.

1995

First planet detected around another sun-like star.

J. Craig Venter sequences the genome (ordering of genes) of a bacterium.

Austria, Finland, and Sweden join the EU.

1996

After double checking previous estimates, the age of the universe is estimated to be between thirteen billion and fifteen billion years. The factor for measuring the age of the universe is the Hubble "constant" (not yet precisely determined).

A large mammal, the sheep named Dolly, is cloned. Dolly lives seven years.

"Triple-therapy cocktails" are shown to halt AID's progress. Initially, they cost up to 15,000 a year.

1996-1998

Al Qaida

The killing of the American servicemen in Somalia was claimed by a terrorist organization called Al Qaida. Most of the other terrorist attacks had also been linked to Al Qaeda, which was known to be financed by the Saudi multi-millionaire and Muslim fanatic Osama bin Laden. In 1996, a fundamentalist movement called Taliban (roughly "seminarians") took over most of Afghanistan. Bin Laden, who had been ostracized in his own country and was expelled from Sudan, obtained refuge there and established a world-wide communications and financial network to promote anti-American terrorism. Bin Laden paraded his hatred of the USA, virulently in 1998 with a personal fatwa or decree declaring all Americans valid targets for Muslim militants. Although he justifies his jihad against America on the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the land that Muhammad said no infidel should step on, bin Laden's hatred also likely stems from the Gulf War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the American government, though often deploring Israeli tactics, has never weakened in its basic, virtually unconditional support for Israel.

1997

The Kyoto Protocol expresses an international agreement on the reduction of "greenhouse gases" (monoxide, methane, etc.). The commitment was to lower emissions at least 5% below levels of 1990. The treaty required ratification of the signatories. In 2001, Pres. George W. Bush said the USA would not sign it. Over 120 states have signed it.

The treaty of Amsterdam implements other federative EU structures.

1998

James Thomson and John Gearhart grow human embryonic stem cells (they contain many different strands of DNA), from which derive specialized cells.

Observation of fast-dimming supernovae suggest the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

EU members enter the European Monetary Union (EMU) except Britain and Sweden.

 1999

Through the Hubble spatial telescope, the first extra-solar multi-planet system is discovered.

125 billion galaxies are inventoried. In 1987 each galaxy was thought to contain on average 100 billion stars.

1999-2002

Formation of East Timor