George Bush (former vice president of Reagan) at the White House

Iran. A series of mass executions of political prisoners is ordered and carried out. The supreme order comes from Ayatollah Khomeini, and they are carried out by Iranian officials throughout Iran, beginning on July 19, 1988, and continuing for approximately five months. The killings took place in at least 32 cities across the country, and estimates of the number of people killed range from 2,500 to 30,000, many of whom were also subjected to torture. Hussein-Ali Montazeri later names Raisi (the future president of Iran) as one of four people involved in the executions of Iranian political prisoners in 1988. Others include Morteza Eshraghi (Tehran prosecutor), Hossein-Ali Nayeri (judge), and Mostafa Pourmohammadi (MOI representative in Evin). The names of the first two are mentioned in Khomeini’s order. Because of this prosecutor’s committee’s involvement in thousands of executions, it has been informally called the “death committee.” Its role has earned Raisi the reputation of “the hanging judge” and the nickname “the butcher of Tehran.” Raisi will die in a helicopter crash on May 19, 2024.

The 1.544 Mbps T-1 Internet backbone is being completed by Merit, IBM, and MCI with the Network Operation Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan; it connects 13 LANs (sites): Merit-Univ. of Michigan, Nat’l Center for Atmospheric Research, Cornell Univ., Nat’l Center for Supercomputing Applic., Pittsburg Supercomputer Center, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Jon Von Neumann Center, BARRNet, MIDNet, WestNet, NorthWestNet, SESQUINET, SURANET; all are U.S. government agencies or universities.

Sussman and Wisdom use the Digital Orrery to demonstrate the Solar System’s chaotic nature, starting from Pluto’s orbit simulated over 845 million years. Stable deterministic chaos, or: unpredictability of position and velocity, but probable (but not certain) stability.

Climatologist James Hansen testifies in the US Senate and declares that he is certain that global warming is taking place and that there is a human contribution.

Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship, under internal and external pressure (from the United States), calls a plebiscite to potentially extend Pinochet’s rule until 1997. This time, however, Pinochet miscalculates. The United States supports the opposition, and international observers are sent to monitor the election. The “No” vote wins with 58% of the vote. Pinochet initially attempts to deny the validity of the result, but is then persuaded to accept it. It is noteworthy that 42% of the voters still voted in favor of the dictator. Democracy has returned to Chile, albeit with heavy compromises with the military.

US-Iran clash in the Persian Gulf

Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA. First conference on Artificial Life: “The Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems,” organized by Christopher Langton, and featuring, among others, Richard Dawkins. Los Alamos, which saw the first demonstration of a new type of mass-death technology, is also witnessing the birth of a new type of life. Of the two responsibilities, Langton concludes, it is difficult to determine which is the more burdensome for humanity.

An international agreement, given the expanding ozone hole, bans hydrofluorocarbons. The treaty is ratified by 197 countries. The ozone hole is shrinking, and it is estimated that it will close completely by the mid-21st century. CFCs were discovered in 1930 by Thomas Midgley and his team, who were searching for a non-toxic, non-flammable compound with a boiling point that would make it usable in refrigeration. After countless attempts, they tried chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which proved very promising and very stable, interacting with almost nothing. Dramatically, to demonstrate the non-toxicity and non-flammability of CFCs, Midgley, in a public demonstration, inhaled CFCs and blew them on a lit candle, extinguishing the flame. They seemed like the perfect gas for refrigerators, and would be used in billions of household refrigerators for decades, dramatically changing our lives for the better. In the 1970s, One million tons of CFCs will be produced annually. Then, in 1974, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlanta, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina announced worrying results. Precisely because of the stability of the CFC molecule, they wander unperturbed in the atmosphere for decades, rising into the stratosphere and finally being broken down by solar radiation. Chlorine atoms in the stratosphere increase the rate of decomposition of the thin ozone layer that protects us from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. Chlorine, moreover, acts only as a catalyst, so it then continues unperturbed to cause further ozone decomposition, undestroyed, thousands of times. The news didn’t cause much alarm until 1985, when increasing depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica was measured, and in 1987, chlorine monoxide (ClO) was discovered: the smoking gun. In 1987, an agreement called the Montreal Protocol obligated signatory nations to gradually reduce CFCs until they were completely phased out. In 1995, Rowland and Molina won the Nobel Prize. The Montreal Agreement is the greatest environmental success of the 20th century, even though the CFCs released into the atmosphere (and the millions of refrigerators still in operation with CFCs—not all nations have signed) will continue to cause harm, perhaps for centuries to come.

Andy Warhol (USA) dies. He was a protagonist of the pop art movement.

Theodore A. Fulton and Gerald J. Dolan of Bell Labs build the first single electron transistor with a Columbus Island

Ken Ribet and Barry Mazur prove the Frey conjecture, thus linking the Tanyiama-Shimura conjecture to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

US supplies 70 Stinger missiles to mujahideen to shoot down Soviet aircraft