Eniwetok Atoll, Operation Ivy, “Mike” detonation at 1m, 10.4 Mton (10,400 Kton), the first thermonuclear (nuclear fusion) bomb, the first “artificial star.” Mike was equipped with a massive 82-ton refrigeration system to keep the deuterium and tritium liquid; the power of the explosion was greater than that of all the weapons of the First and Second World Wars; the mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 43,300 m and expanded to a maximum diameter of 161 km. The island of Elugelab, where the bomb was detonated, disappeared, sucked upward by the mushroom cloud. What remained was a crater 2 km in diameter filled with seawater, 50 m deep. The explosion was a 10.4 Mton explosion.

The United States tests the first thermonuclear bomb on Bikini Atoll (designed by Edward Teller) (fission bomb that triggers a fusion bomb)

Leningrad, Russia. A little north of Nevsky Prospect, at Maternity Hospital No. 6, Vladimir Putin was born. The hospital was founded by Catherine the Great and is the oldest in Russia.

Great Britain. The first British strategic nuclear bomber, the Vulcan, makes its test flight. Four months later, the Victor follows, on December 25th. The first, however, was the Valiant, which was only a temporary solution to fill a gap in time. The three models (Valiant, Vulcan, Victor) constitute the British nuclear V-Force. 107 Valiants, 136 Avro Vulcans, and 86 Victors will be produced. The Vulcan and Victor projects were approved in June 1952, in competition with each other, given the importance of nuclear deterrence they represented. The Vulcan will be used as a bomber in the Falklands War, while the Victor will be converted into a tanker and will be used successfully in the Falklands War and the First Gulf War. The Vulcan B-1 will be delivered for the first time to the RAF in 1956; Deliveries of the improved B-2 Vulcan began in 1960. The B-2 featured more powerful engines, a larger wing, an improved electrical system and electronic countermeasures, and many were modified to accept the Blue Steel missile. Although the Vulcan was typically armed with nuclear weapons, it could also carry out conventional bombing missions, as it did in Operation Black Buck during the Falklands War between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982.

Alan Turing publishes “The chemical basis of morphogenesis,” exploring hypotheses about how patterns are generated in plants and animals.

7.7 earthquake north of Los Angeles

United States. The Republican National Convention opens. MacArthur is the keynote speaker. The nomination goes to Ike Eisenhower, who chooses Richard Nixon as his running mate.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is founded. One of its key founders was Edward Teller, who strongly supported a nuclear weapons development laboratory independent of Los Alamos, where he disagreed with Oppenheimer and other scientists. Edward Teller founded Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LLNL) and proceeded to position the laboratory for national security significance. In addition to being the driving force behind the successful testing of the first hydrogen bomb, he advanced the concept of the submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), which ultimately led to the prototype warhead for the Polaris SLBM. Edward Teller’s tenure as director of LLNL lasted from 1958 to the mid-1960s. In 1998, he said, “The Laboratory is the only thing in my life I’m completely happy with,” and cited three specific contributions of great significance: the introduction of large-scale computers into scientific endeavors and the laboratories’ leadership in that area; the development of nuclear weapons that could be launched from submarines; and work on strategic defense, which he and others believe led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

A squadron of B-45s modified for reconnaissance (RB-45-C) flies at night over Lithuania (USSR), Belarus (USSR), and Ukraine (USSR). This is an RAF mission, approved by Churchill at the request of the Americans. The mission will be repeated in 1954.

Ruben Rausing, in Sweden, founded Tetra Pak

Eckert and Mauchly, EMCC – Remington Rand had not forgotten the value of the women programmers they had met in the US Navy and hired Betty Snider Holberton (who would develop COBOL and FORTRAN), Jenny Jennings Bartik, Kay McNulty, and the legendary Grace Hopper, who in 1952 would create the first compiler, A-0 (and had already introduced and implemented subroutines, the concept of debugging, and bug fixing). Hopper understood that hardware would become a commodity and therefore software would have to be hardware-independent.

George VI dies. After a long battle with cancer, George VI, King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, has passed away. Second son of George V, he ascended the throne in 1936 following the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, who had not given up marrying American divorcee Wallis Simpson. During World War II, George dedicated himself to keeping his people’s morale high by visiting bombed-out areas and war zones. With his wife, Elizabeth, he never left Buckingham Palace, braving the bombs and giving up the option of taking refuge in the countryside. He also delivered a series of radio messages of encouragement to the people, overcoming a natural stammer. In poor health since 1949, the king continued to fulfill his duties until his death in 1952. He was succeeded by his eldest daughter, Elizabeth II, who was crowned on June 2, 1953.

George VI dies, succeeded by his daughter Elizabeth II, who becomes Queen of England and reigns for more than half a century.

Lisbon, Portugal. NATO meets and decides that by the end of the year, member states must provide 42 ready-to-use divisions, and 45 additional divisions ready to be mobilized within 30 days. Soon after, the latter figure will be increased to 48, for a total of 90 divisions. This is to be able to counter a potential Soviet attack with conventional forces. However, this objective will never be achieved in the history of the Atlantic Alliance. Indeed, the intense use of technology will dramatically transform NATO’s tactics and strategy and will make mass armies lose some of their meaning. In 1953, the target is reduced to 66 divisions. Furthermore, European nations will move away from compulsory conscription, and cost constraints will place severe restrictions on the actual number of operational divisions. Therefore, NATO strategy will have to rely on containing the Soviet intervention in the first one or two weeks in central and northern Germany, before eventually moving on to the use of nuclear weapons.

Raphael Robinson, at Berkeley, writes a program for the Standard Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) that calculates a huge Mersenne prime: 2^521 – 1. A few hours later, he produces an even bigger one: 2^607 – 1. That same year, he will find three more. The largest becomes 2^2281 – 1.

During Eisenhower’s presidency, the government’s Signal Intelligence Agency (NSA) received considerable funding, which also went toward establishing a database network based on IBM mainframes and later Cray supercomputers. Ike Eisenhower was well aware of the benefits the Ultra interception program had brought during the war just ended.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is founded.

Marzabotto Massacre Trial. The trial of SS Major Walter Reder, battalion commander of the 16th Reichsführer Panzer Division, accused of being responsible for the series of massacres collectively known as the “Marzabotto Massacre,” begins at the Bologna Military Court. The trial will conclude on October 31 with a life sentence (the major will be released in January 1985). Beginning in late May 1944, several German military units launched a widespread operation against partisans in the vast Apennine area of Marzabotto. This operation escalated into attacks on local civilians, fragmenting into individual attacks whose precise timing and total number of victims are still unknown. The peak occurred between late September and early October, when several hundred civilians were massacred, 189 of whom were children under the age of 12. The 1951 trial did not reveal the responsibility of the numerous soldiers and officers involved in the massacre, despite having acquired some of their names in the records. This was revealed by the discovery of some trial files in the so-called “closet of shame,” discovered by chance in May 1994, where 695 files on massacres that occurred after September 8th had been hidden for reasons of international politics.

Geophysical Service changes name to Texas Instruments

Chinese Maoists destroy Lhasa in Tibet

Korea: Battle of Heartbreak Ridge, costs 3,700 American and 25,000 North Korean deaths

Korea: Battle of Bloody Ridge, one of the bloodiest of the war: the 15th Field Artillery Battalion sets a record by firing 14,425 cannon rounds in 24 hours

The aircraft carrier Essex suffers the worst disaster of the Korean War: an F2H Banshee botches its landing (it fails to lower its tailhook) and crashes into other parked aircraft: four people are burned alive, seven jump into the sea, three of whom are burned by kerosene, and eight aircraft are reduced to ashes; Neil Armstrong is also a pilot on board the aircraft carrier.

By order of President Truman, the Nevada Test Range (Area 51) was established, northwest of Las Vegas; over the next 40 years, more than 900 nuclear tests were conducted there, almost all of them in the 1950s and 1960s.

On the Virginia-Pennsylvania border, Site-R is built, a secure facility dug into the hard granite of Raven Rock, 800 meters inside the mountain and 800 meters below its peak. It has the resources and space to house 10,000 high-ranking American officials in the event of a nuclear conflict. It is located 150 kilometers from the White House and 10 kilometers from Camp David. A similar site is also being built in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Berryville, Virginia.

Neil Armstrong’s first mission in the Korean War

Richard Feynman spent the 1951-52 sabbatical granted to him by Caltech at the CBPF in Rio de Janeiro. Here he continued his research, frequented the beach, the bars, and the PanAm hostesses at the Miramar Palace in Copacabana, attended a samba school, became a skilled frigideira player, and joined a musical group that later competed in the famous Rio Carnival.

Henrietta Lacks cells (HeLa cell line) are cloned as part of cancer research; within half a century, the HeLa cell culture will reach industrial proportions: tons per day; all, technically, are Henrietta Lacks clones.

The birth control pill was developed by Gregory Pincus.

The development of SAGE by Lincoln Laboratories (a military-funded institution affiliated with MIT) allows some of its founder Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider’s revolutionary ideas to be realized: decentralized networks, multitasking time-sharing, facilitated human-machine interfaces (HMIs), machines that work with and for humans, not instead of humans, to create a human-machine symbiosis. SAGE includes 23 tracking centers on U.S. soil, connected by telephone lines, capable of connecting to over 400 aircraft in flight.

To get an idea of the progress of computer electronics from 1951 to 2017, let’s make a comparison with automobiles: in 1951, the UNIVAC performed 2,000 operations per second and was the fastest computer around, while one of the fastest cars was the Alfa Romeo 6C. If cars had experienced the same increase in speed that computers have had in computing power, they would now be traveling at 8 million times the speed of light.

The UNIVAC is delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau; it uses magnetic tape to store the program and input data. It is the first general-purpose commercial electronic computer.

Eniwetok Atoll: Operation GreenHouse, “Item” thermonuclear detonation from 61m tower: 45.5Kton; uses deuterium-tritium gas in the bomb core to enhance the fission stage initiation; resulting in double the overall efficiency.