Robert Capa, a Hungarian-born American who accompanied the French in Vietnam, was killed by an anti-personnel mine; he was the most famous photographer of the Second World War.

Heinz Guderian dies in West Germany. Considered by some historians a unique example of an officer who theorized a new military technique and also put his theory into practice, Guderian remains one of the most famous and important figures of the Second World War, and his campaigns at the head of the panzers remain essential examples for the study and understanding of mobile warfare with mechanized forces. It is worth noting this paradoxical circumstance: although Guderian, in a certain sense, embodied the “blitzkrieg” as the greatest advocate of the use of armored vehicles and was one of the principal architects of Germany’s successes in World War II, at the same time, he was well aware, even several years before the outbreak of war, of the enormous war potential of the Soviet enemy and the quantitative superiority of the Soviet armed forces over those of Germany.

An RAF B-47 aircraft (RB-47E), modified for reconnaissance (upon American request), flying over the Kola Peninsula and airfields east of Leningrad, was flanked and repeatedly hit by MiG-17s. The aircraft managed to return to base, but from now on Washington banned low-altitude missions over Soviet soil. This laid the foundations for the U-2 (high-altitude flight) and CORONA spy satellite programs.

The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security) was born from the NKVD.

Bikini Atoll, Operation Castle; “Bravo” detonation: the “Shrimp” device is detonated. But due to errors in the bomb’s design, it turns out to be much more powerful than expected. The first signs that something has gone wrong arrive at the trigger bunker, 35 kilometers from the explosion, where Bernard O’Keefe is located. He is a man of strong nerves, who, the night before the raid on Nagasaki, had changed the connections for the plutonium bomb’s trigger because they were incorrect, defying procedure and permits. This is a man who, in 1953, climbed the tower where an unexploded nuclear device lay, and accidentally disconnected the trigger connector. O’Keefe feels the bunker swaying and moving and refuses to believe it: the underground bunker is anchored to the island’s rock and has 1-meter-thick reinforced concrete walls. O’Keefe feels nauseated or seasick. The shock wave has reached them through the rock, faster than the shock wave in the air. After 15 minutes, they emerge from the bunker to observe the scene: the palm trees are down, the birds have disappeared, the radioactivity is starting to rise, then small rocks begin to fall from the sky (35 km away!). They return to the bunker for shelter. They will be evacuated by helicopter, like hundreds of villages on nearby islands more than 100 km away. The explosion had been 15 million tons.

Bikini Atoll, Operation Castle; “Bravo” detonation on the surface (2m); 15Mton; crater 2km, 76m deep, mushroom cloud reaches 40,000m and a diameter of 106km

Bruno Augenstein of the RAND Corporation delivers the final report, “A Revised Development Program for Ballistic Missiles of Intercontinental Range,” concluding that the development of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) should be a priority. The thermonuclear Atlas D will enter service in September 1959, initially carrying 1.44 million ton W49 warheads.

Hugh Everett, after a couple of sherries with Charles Misner (his classmate) and Aage Peterson (Niels Bohr’s visitor and assistant) thinks of “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics”; in these moments Everett has the intuition of the so-called “Many-Worlds” theory and in the following weeks he begins to develop it.

French forces occupy the Vietnamese town of Dien Bien Phu, on the border with Laos; they are surrounded by 40,000 Viet Minh

Robert Oppenheimer is formally accused of association with known and unknown communists, but above all of the so-called Chevalier affair and of having actively tried to convince scientists not to work on Edward Teller’s H-bomb project.

Robert Oppenheimer shows up for a meeting with Lewis Strauss, who wants to deny him access to classified information.

Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan built the first prototype neutrino detector at one of the nuclear reactors at the Hanford Engineering Works in Washington state. This was Project Poltergeist. But they soon realized that they recorded the same average number of events even when the reactors were shut down. They therefore built a second one 12 meters underground at the Savannah River reactor, just 10 meters from the reactor core. And they finally found the elusive neutrino.

Nevada Range: Operation Upshot-Knothole, “Dirty Harry” atmospheric nuclear detonation: most efficient low-yield fission explosion; tower explosion, 32 Ktons; causes one of the largest radiological disasters in North America: alone produces 30,000 of the total 85,000 roentgens/person of all North American nuclear tests; the overall increase in average radiation levels caused by all atmospheric nuclear tests is comparable to the difference in radioactivity perceived by someone living in a brick house (more radioactive) compared to someone living in a wooden house, and much less than the difference in radioactivity perceived by someone living at sea level or at 2000 m altitude.

Draper Lab successfully installs and tests an Inertial Navigation System (INS) on an MIT B-29. The test flight is from Boston to Los Angeles. Eleven people are on board, but they will not touch the controls once aloft. After 2,232 nautical miles of navigation and a 12-hour, 38-minute flight, the position error is only 9 miles. The system weighs 1,000 pounds and has a diameter of 1 meter. In the version that will be used on the Apollo missions, it will be 1 foot in diameter, weigh 400 kg, and the position error on the Boston-LA leg is reduced to just 2 miles.

Thursday morning, 9:50 a.m. Stalin dies, succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev. From 1917 to 1953, at least 18 million people passed through the GULag system in the USSR. The death toll from shootings, torture, starvation, cold, and forced labor in the GULag concentration camps is between 1.5 and 1.7 million (Soviet sources and subsequent estimates, including recent ones), in addition to the 30 million deaths in World War II. The GULag system was abandoned only after 1959.

Soviet Union. Stalin, suffering a stroke, is left unattended for several hours, as no one dares call a doctor due to the alleged (hysterical) “doctors’ conspiracy,” a conspiracy theory according to which Soviet doctors, mostly Jewish, systematically murdered leading members of the regime.