Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician of Moroccan origin, after having delivered to the Sunday Times some photos which demonstrate that Israel is building atomic bombs, is lured by a Mossad agent, taken to Italy (to avoid a diplomatic incident with Great Britain) and there
Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician of Moroccan origin, flies to London to the Sunday Times headquarters with some photos proving that Israel is building atomic bombs.
A huge cloud of carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing 1,700 people; the cloud is 500m thick and traveling at 20-50km/h.
The legendary Grace Hopper, a pioneer of SW, retires from the US Navy at 79, with the rank of admiral. She is the oldest active-duty officer.
Paul Townsend and others develop the theory of 10- or 11-dimensional p-branes, and strings fall into this category as a special case.
Several countries, independently, are opening up to free trade and eliminating customs barriers: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, India, Argentina, Chile, and China. Generally, inequalities increase, but so does well-being.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar completes a modern exposition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in his “Newton’s Principia for the General Reader” (though what he means by “general reader” is certainly not what the general reader means…). Euler had done a first complete work in 1735 in “Mechanics.”
The Sabra and Shatila massacre (مجزرة صبرا وشاتيلا): the massacre, carried out by the Lebanese Phalange, allied with Israel, and the South Lebanon Army, with the complicity of the Israeli army, of between 762 and 3,500 civilians, predominantly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites. The massacre occurred
The work of 420 Navajo Indians encoding and decoding classified military information during World War II is finally being recognized with August 14th being designated “National Navajo Code Talkers Day.” The work was partially revealed starting in 1968, after being classified for decades. The story
Roberto Calvi, director of Banco Ambrosiano, commits suicide under Blackfriars Bridge in London.
The Asinara prison is closed due to poor medical treatment for inmates. The now deserted Fornelli branch will remain closed for over ten years, when it will be renovated and transformed into a maximum security prison, with the construction of a full-fledged “bunker” to house
After the disappointment with Kildall, Bill Gates calls an old acquaintance of Paul Allen’s: Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products. This time, instead of sending IBM to them, Microsoft takes care of it directly. In September, he will have the contract with IBM.
Bill Gates calls his childhood friend Gary Kildall to send him the IBM people. He advises them to treat them well because they are important people. The four men, wearing ties and black suits, show up at the Kildall house, but only his wife is
Jack Sams of IBM calls Bill Gates and asks to see him the next day. A few weeks earlier, Gates had recruited his old Harvard roommate, Steve Ballmer, and asks him to accompany him to IBM. “You’re the only other member of the company who
Montreal, Canada. The newspaper La Presse publishes rumors about the release of American diplomats who escaped capture in Iran thanks to the involvement of the Canadian Embassy. It fails to mention the CIA and Operation Argo. For the next 17 years, the world will remain
Iran. National elections. It’s also the day of the planned exfiltration of escaped American diplomats, through Operation Argo.
NORAD, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. 11:00 a.m. The NORAD computer declares that the United States is under nuclear attack. The screens show ICBMs launched from the West Coast of the United States. Confirmations arrive from other computers on the network, and now missiles from Soviet territory
Military anthrax leaks in the closed city of Sverdlovsk, a military-industrial complex in the Soviet Union. It produces tanks, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. An accident caused by radioactive leaks over 1,000 square kilometers had already occurred in 1958. The biological laboratories had been built
China. Chinese Premier Hua Guofeng summarizes the results of the Third Vietnam War, in which the Chinese invaded Vietnam and then withdrew after six weeks. With a disdainful jab, he points to the role of the Soviets, who didn’t have time to organize: “They didn’t
4:00 a.m. local time. Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, nuclear accident. A partial core meltdown occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Dauphin County. It was the most serious nuclear accident in the United States, resulting in the release of small amounts of
Diplomatic recognition between Washington and Beijing during the Carter presidency and Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. This represents a triple somersault for American diplomacy, recognizing the People’s Republic of China but continuing to maintain close relations with Taiwan, despite no longer having a diplomatic mission in Taipei.
China. In 1979, the one-child policy was introduced, suggested by rocket scientist Song Jian, who became the architect of this policy. It limited Han families to only one child (two if the first is a girl). It was abandoned in 2015. Its impact on population
Venera 11 launches and lands on Venus, but lens cap melts, preventing the first color images of the planet from being collected.
West Germany. The terrorists and far-left militants of the Red Army Faction (RAF), Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan Carl Raspe, were found dead in their cell in Stammheim prison. The first was killed by a gunshot to the back of the head, the second
The Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio University recorded a very narrow band radio signal at the frequency of 1420 MHz (hydrogen band) for 150 seconds, it will be called the “Wow!” signal because of the note next to the recording placed by researcher Jerry
Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman publicly disclose RSA, an asymmetric encryption system. They did so through an article by Martin Gardner in Scientific American, titled “A new kind of cipher that would take millions of years to break.” The basic mechanism is based
New York, National Computer Conference. The audience of cryptography experts is astonished by the presentation of the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle exchange scheme, which enables two interlocutors (usually called Alice and Bob) to exchange a secret through public discussion. Whitfield Diffie (Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, a graduate
Second Second Culture Music Festival, held in Bojanovice, Czechoslovakia. Following this festival, all members of the musical group Plastic People of the Universe were arrested and tried on charges of antisocialism, nihilism, and decadence, and sentenced to between eight and eighteen months in prison. This
Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme, a Californian girl suffering from depression, attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford with a Colt automatic at the Sacramento Capitol Park. Captured by the Secret Service, she will serve a life sentence in prison.
During the inaugural ceremony of the Arecibo radio telescope, Frank Drake sent a powerful radio signal with a message to the globular cluster M13, composed of 300,000 stars, which he will reach in 25,000 years. It is the famous sequence of 73 rows by 23
United Nations, New York. Yasser Arafat’s “gun and olive branch speech,” in which he reiterates that “the Zionist entity must disappear.”
The Soviets began setting up an automated system called Perimeter, a network of sensors and computers that could automatically order a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States with ICBMs. It was completed in 1985 and dubbed “Dead Hand.” The USSR, with its highly hierarchical
A group of Chinese farmers, digging a well in Xi’an, found a terracotta warrior; subsequent excavations, lasting years and not yet concluded, brought to light over 7000 statues like this one, of exquisite workmanship and each unique in its details; it is a complex part
Lieutenant Hiroo Onada of the Imperial Japanese Army emerges from the jungle in Lubang, Philippines, unaware that World War II had ended 29 years earlier. He agrees to surrender only after speaking with his commander (who was still alive in Japan). He won’t be the
United States. A classified document titled “Implications of World Wide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,” informally known as The Kissinger Report, warns the president of the possibility of massive famines in some of the world’s poorest regions. The predictions will not come
The Saturn V AS-513 brings the Skylab into orbit, derived from the SIV-B, the third stage of the Saturn V