Indonesia. Chinese-language publications are outlawed.

B-52, taking off from North Carolina on a Chrome Dome mission, begins its second in-flight refueling mission a couple of miles above Spain. The plane rendezvouses with the tanker too quickly, enters the refueling pipe, which explodes and turns the tanker into a fireball, killing all four crew members. Four of the B-52’s crew members manage a daring escape, while two others die inside the plane, which crashes near Palomares. It was carrying four Mark-28 nuclear bombs. The village in southern Spain is remote, poor, and poorly served by roads. Three of the four bombs are found in the first hours of the search. The Marines search for the fourth for 45 days, without success. It is then found at the bottom of the sea by the deep-sea submersible Alvin. During recovery operations, the cables break, and the bomb falls back into the depths. Nine days later, it is recovered again by the Alvin. The incident raises serious questions about whether nuclear weapons should continue to be carried on aircraft during peacetime, now that thousands of nuclear missiles on ICBMs and submarines perform the same task more safely.

Livermore, California. The Special Projects Group, aka Z Division, is formed to gather as much information as possible about Soviet nuclear weapons. Some members of this team will be aboard the Global Marine to recover the Soviet submarine K-129.

Gemini 7 and 6: The first joint mission of two Gemini probes: the first is launched: Gemini VII, carrying Borman and Lovell, will remain in orbit for 14 days; the first use of soft headgear instead of hard helmets

La-Drang: First direct clash between American and North Vietnamese troops in Vietnam; the episode is the basis of the film “We Were Soldiers”; approximately 50 Americans and approximately 1,600 North Vietnamese die.

Vietnam. American generals demand from the president an additional 113,000 troops, a naval blockade of the North, and a B-52 bombing of Hanoi. Johnson explodes with rage, calling them “shitheads,” “dumb shits,” “fucking pompous assholes,” and “military idiots.”

Burundi. Tutsis versus Hutus. 140,000 dead.

A total blackout across the Northeast caused by a fault in a Canadian power plant leaves over 30 million people without electricity.

Baikonur, USSR. First launch of the Soviet UR-500 launch vehicle. Designed by Chelomei, it was the first Soviet launch with storable propellant, or with propellant contained in tanks, which did not require special temperature or pressure control.

Mariner 4 passes within 9,846 km of Mars, capturing images with resolutions up to 1 km per pixel, for a total of 634 KB of data sent back to Earth. These are the first clear images of the planet. After the initial images and other scientific data, the disappointment is palpable: we hadn’t understood anything about the Red Planet: no water, a thin atmosphere, no magnetic field, no radiation belts. But rather than waning, interest is growing.

Gemini-Titan IV: McDivitt-White; first spacewalk (Extra-Vehicular Activity, EVA), performed by White (22 minutes)

Lockheed makes the first C130 STOL (Short Take Off and Landing) operational: it carries 92 soldiers

Stewart presents the platform that will take his name in an important article

American George Heilmeier develops the first liquid crystal display

The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform, a discrete version of the Fourier Transform) algorithm is developed.

Digital releases the DEC PDP-8; due to its reasonable cost ($18,000) 50,000 are soon sold.

Moore’s Law predicts that the number of components in a uP will double and its price will halve every year. Gordon Moore published the article “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” in the journal Electronics. He thus predicted the greatest explosion of innovation and wealth creation in the entire history of humanity.

First Deep Learning Machine Algorithms (Ivakhnenko)

Marshall Space Center, Huntsville, Alabama. The S-IC-T, the first stage of the Saturn V, ignites for 6.5 seconds, demonstrating its full 33,000,000 N (3,300 tons) of thrust. I visited Marshall Space Center way back in 1994, a weekend during a trip to “nearby” Tennessee. It houses a complete Saturn V. It’s impressive to see a full-scale Space Shuttle model (the Shuttle Pathfinder) appear, and booster rockets soaring above the treetops after hours of traveling through the woods. Another Saturn V is in Houston (pictured) and a third at Cape Canaveral.

Leonov’s first spacewalk (Extra-Vehicular Activity, EVA) (20 minutes); in reality, the operation nearly ends in disaster: Leonov’s spacesuit inflates too much, so much so that after a while he is no longer able to move his arms and legs and is unable to re-enter the capsule; after several minutes of panic, he manages to deflate the suit a little and re-enter; just before re-entry into the atmosphere, the automatic guidance system jams and the cosmonauts have to re-enter in manual mode and therefore land in an uninhabited area of the Siberian taiga; after spending the night in sub-zero temperatures crouched in the capsule to escape the wolves, they are finally rescued by the Russian military.

Tetra Pak begins paper production in Rubiera (Reggio Emilia)

Robert Cade, a nephrologist at the University of Florida, creates Gatorade (alliGATOR + lemonADE) for the Gators football team. It consists of water and lemon salts.

Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) is gunned down by his followers and replaced by Louis Abdul Farrakhan (born Louis Eugene Walcott), a calypso singer who ran Mosque 7 in Harlem. He states: “…the inferiority of the Christian religion is demonstrated by the fact that, beginning with scientific discoveries, all the conquests of humanity are due to Islam. The only white man worthy of respect is my idol, Adolf Hitler, who eliminated so many Jews.”

A Saturn I (SA-9 vehicle) lifts off from Launch Complex 37-B at Cape Canaveral carrying a Pegasus satellite to test the rate and size of meteorite impacts in space.

Vietnam. First air raids against the North.

Indonesia. Anti-communist year of living dangerously. Indonesian Communist Revolt. A failed communist uprising that leads to the killing of several Indonesian generals by rebels sparks a brutal crackdown that leaves approximately half a million people dead.

The Medicare and Medicaid agencies were created by President Lyndon Johnson as part of the Social Security program.

Singapore leaves the Malaysian federation

Nicolae Ceausescu takes power in Romania after Georgy Georgedei

Prime Minister Smith of British Rhodesia unilaterally declares independence from the United Kingdom

United States. Clair Cameron Patterson publishes the article “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man,” in which he denounces lead contamination in the modern environment, citing years of experiments he conducted. His evidence ultimately prevails, and in 1973, the United States begins to progressively reduce the amount of lead in gasoline, finally eliminating it completely in 1986. The amount of lead in Americans’ blood by 1995 will have dropped by up to 80% compared to the 1970s. In Europe, such measures will be adopted with a delay of one or two decades.

The entire world’s computing power, including all human beings and all (few) electronic devices, will be surpassed, half a century later, by a modern laptop computer of the early 21st century.

Olivetti produces the P101 (Programma 101), with a futuristic design by Mario Bellini: it is perhaps the first personal computer in the world

USSR. On December 30, 1964, the decision was made to build 16 N-1 rockets. The first mock-up of an N-1 arrived on the launch pad on November 25, 1967, and was photographed by a CORONA spy satellite just two weeks later. The first N-1 was ready on the launch pad on May 7, 1968. The plan aimed for a lunar landing in September 1968. A crack in the fuel tanks was discovered and the launch was postponed. The comparison with the Saturn V was merciless: four out of four failed launches for the N-1, 13 out of 13 successful for the Saturn V. The main advantage of the Americans was the use of hydrogen and exhaustive ground tests before launches. Korolev’s LOK (and LK) capsule (OKB-1), launchable from an N-1, competes with the lunar projects of Chelomei (OKB-52), who wanted to launch an L-1 (Zond) capsule around the Moon with a Proton UR-500K. Several Proton launches (1967-68) with an L-1 Zond capsule will have problems with the launcher or the capsule.