Crisis in the European Monetary System. Capital inflows into emerging countries.

The Catholic Church apologizes to Galileo Galilei

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the monkey farm in Georgia (Caucasus), created by Stalin back in 1929 (by decision of the CPSU in 1926) with the aim of studying the possibility of creating an army of ape-men with intermediate properties between humans and monkeys, was dismantled.

Similaun man discovered on the Austrian-Italian border

Evidence found for crater in Yucatan responsible for dinosaur extinction

Mikhail Gorbachev resigns

Alma Ata Agreement: 11 republics replace the USSR and Gorbachev is dismissed

The summit of the twelve European Union countries opens in Maastricht, the Netherlands, where monetary union will be decided. This is one of the final steps in the creation of the European Union. The heads of state of the dozen members of what was then the European Community meet to finalize the lengthy negotiations that will give rise to the Maastricht Treaty, the legal foundation of the European Union.

At the Bison Lodge hotel in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Nature Reserve in Belarus, Yelstin (Russia), Kravchuk (Ukraine), Shushkevich (Belarus), discuss the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its replacement with a Commonwealth of Independent States

A referendum in Ukraine officially sanctions the separation from the USSR with a large and overwhelming majority

The last of the 732 oil wells set on fire by Iraqis in Kuwait has been extinguished.

The KGB is dissolved and replaced by the FSB

Serbian troops intervene heavily in besieged Vukovar

George H.W. Bush announces the unilateral withdrawal of all short-range nuclear weapons. (The hawkish Cheney insists on “withdrawal,” not “destruction”—you never know…)

Following the failed coup by the hawks, the power of the CPSU crumbles; strengthened by the suppression of the coup, Yeltsin takes power and abolishes the Communist Party. The collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union; and the end of 46 years of the Cold War. The Cold War caused 8.5 million deaths in 30 countries. For the United States alone, the cost is estimated at around $10 trillion, of which $5.5 trillion was for the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons.

Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines: it’s the largest of the century. The U.S. base at Clark had just been evacuated as a precaution (marking the end of the U.S. presence in the Philippines).

NEC’s Sumiro Iijima Discovers Carbon Nanotubes

Operation Desert Hell begins: the 732 oil wells burned by Iraqis in Kuwait are extinguished (6 million barrels a day are going up in smoke).

The Allies established two no-fly zones in Iraq south of the 33rd parallel and north of the 36th parallel; over the next 10 years, American and British aircraft flew more than 350,000 missions over the no-fly zones.

First Gulf War: 382 American casualties, thousands of Iraqi deaths, $102 billion

Somali dictator Siad Barre flees the country and flees to safety in Nairobi, Kenya.

General George Lee Butler is appointed head of the American SAC (Strategic Air Command). In the first weeks of his tenure, he decides to scrutinize the SIOP: the list of nuclear targets on Soviet (soon Russian) territory. He finds bridges in the middle of nowhere in Siberia hit by multiple nuclear warheads to ensure their destruction, targets hit dozens of times. Moscow would be hit by hundreds of nuclear warheads, many to destroy individual radar installations. He declares that, with the possible exception of the similar Soviet document, this is the most absurd and irresponsible document he has ever seen in his life. He adds that he firmly believes we avoided nuclear holocaust through a combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, but the latter factor was probably the determining factor. Butler will eliminate 75% of the targets.

Iraq. With the first wave of American bombers departing from Saudi Arabia for Baghdad, there were also F-117 Stealth bombers, invisible to radar, carrying 1,000-kg Paveway laser-guided bombs, and 116 Tomahawk missiles in flight. The technology that guides them and the laser-guided bombs actually originated several decades earlier with integrated circuits from Texas Instruments, and was tested on the Thanh Hoa Bridge in 1972 toward the end of the Vietnam War. Laser-guided bombs hit their targets 13 times more frequently than traditional bombs. This is a game-changing technology, first tested on a large scale in the Persian Gulf in 1991. The success of these weapons reverberates far beyond Iraq’s borders, reaching as far as Moscow and other capitals.

UN approves resolution on use of force against Iraq: Operation Desert Shield begins

Austin, Texas. Robert Noyce dies. Nicknamed “the mayor of Silicon Valley,” he was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited with developing the first monolithic integrated circuit, or microchip, which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia begins: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Vojvodina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia.