“The Polygon,” Kazakhstan. In a desert area of Kazakhstan, known to insiders as “The Polygon,” which was not marked on any map at the time, the Soviet Union detonated 566 atomic bombs: 266 in the air and 300 underground.

Albert II is the first monkey (a macaque) in space, launched by the Americans to an altitude of 134 km in a V-2 rocket. Upon reentry, the parachute fails to open, and Albert II dies.

Operation Magic Carpet: 49,000 Yemenite Jews are flown to Israel on American and British planes, in an operation kept secret until its completion.

Four years after the unconditional surrender, the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) came into force, establishing the Federal Republic of Germany, thus unifying the three zones of British, French, and American occupation.

Torino’s plane crashes. A plane carrying the entire Torino team crashes into the Basilica of Superga. No one from the team that had dominated football since 1943 survives the crash. The country receives the news with emotion: the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, in mourning, suspend their sessions that evening.

David Ben Gurion, Israeli Prime Minister

Dutch coup in Jakarta: the entire Indonesian government is captured by paratroopers.

Pasadena, California. The Theory of Automata is born at the Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior. John von Neumann had been thinking about the basic ideas for some time, and had presented some of them two years earlier at Princeton. He asked, for example, whether an automaton could generate another equally complicated one, with small differences, and eventually evolve as a species. At the heart of von Neumann’s thinking is the Universal Turing Machine, which, given the description of any other Turing Machine, can imitate it. These concepts would be published by von Neumann many years later, in 1966, in the book “Theory of Self-reproducing Automata.”

Attack against Togliatti in Rome

Bell Labs Auditorium in New York, West Street, Manhattan. The official announcement of the invention of the transistor. It was misunderstood at the time by many media outlets (and not only), but it would make a difference for the rest of the 20th century and beyond, enabling the incredible development of electronics, the Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions, with the web, computers, smartphones, and everything related to which we are now more than accustomed. On June 30, 1948, Bell Labs, in the presence of its employees William Bradford Shockley, Walter H. Brattain, and John Bardeen, officially announced the invention of the first solid-state amplifier, the transistor, to the press. The New York Times relegated the news to page 46, tiny under “News on Radio,” while TIME featured it as the first article in its science section under the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs was a melting pot of innovations at the time. They were excellent at creating them, but less so at exploiting them. To avoid antitrust issues, they sell transistor patent licenses freely for as little as $25,000, including professional training in manufacturing techniques. This attracts the attention of several companies, including Texas Instruments, a Texas oil company that has recently refocused on electronics.

Operation Nahshon: A military operation during the 1948 Palestine War to lift the siege of Jerusalem, clear the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, blocked by Palestinian Arabs, and supply supplies and weapons to the isolated Jewish communities in Jerusalem. Nahshon was the name given to the Haganah’s first major military operation and constituted the first phase of Plan Dalet, a series of guidelines for taking control of the territories assigned to Palestinian Jews by the UN in the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine, to defend its borders and the population within them, including Palestinian Jews outside them, and to forestall the feared intervention of the surrounding Arab powers on behalf of the Muslim and Christian Arabs. Plan Dalet was drawn up to conquer Arab towns and villages within and outside the area assigned to the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan for Palestine. In the event of resistance, the Arabs in the conquered villages were to be expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state. If no resistance was encountered, the Arab residents could remain under Jewish military rule. Operation Nahshon was conducted by the Haganah’s Givati Brigade and the Palmach’s Harel Brigade.

Vorkuta, Soviet Union. An uprising occurs at construction site No. 501 of the Shivaya Maska-Salekhard railway. The initiative comes from former soldiers who had served in the war, young men with still some self-confidence and the will to act. At the head is former Colonel Voronin, a one-eyed man, and Lieutenant Sakurenko, a tank driver. They arm themselves with the guards’ rifles and move toward the city of Vorkuta, 60 kilometers away. Paratroopers are dropped, and low-flying fighters strafe the insurgents. The survivors are captured, some shot, others sentenced to 25 and 10 years.

Charles Lindbergh is commissioned by the U.S. government to assess the state of SAC (Strategic Air Command), the branch of the U.S. Air Force dedicated to a possible American nuclear counterattack. Lindbergh finds morale low, training poor, landings risky, frequent accidents, and poor maintenance. After only a month, General Kenney is relieved of command and replaced by General Curtis E. LeMay. LeMay is considered a war hero, having revolutionized bombing practices on both the Pacific and European fronts. Nicknamed “Iron Ass,” he is seen as an innovator by his admirers and a ruthless mass murderer of civilians by his detractors. However, he will revolutionize SAC, making it a reliable and lethal counterattack instrument, unparalleled in American and world history. He will always focus on attack rather than defense, always emphasizing that there are no “limited” wars: war, for those directly involved and at risk of losing their lives or those of their loved ones, is always “total.”

The American military plan, HALFMOON, in the likely event of a Red Army attack on Western Europe, envisioned containing the Russians for the first two weeks, during which they would reach as far as the Netherlands. Then, 50 atomic bombs, later increased to 133, would be dropped on Soviet cities. Moscow would be hit by eight atomic bombs and Leningrad by seven. It predicted the deaths of 2.7 million Russian civilians from nuclear explosions alone, not including the fires they caused, and a reduction in industrial capacity of 30-40%. It admitted, however, that it would still not be enough to stop the Red Army from occupying Western Europe. The plan’s primary purpose was to save Great Britain. Later (from 1949), after the first Soviet nuclear tests, the plan would be updated. If the Soviets were to launch a nuclear attack, the counterattack would be launched not only from Great Britain but also from bombers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Okinawa, Egypt, and India. Truman didn’t like the plan.

Czechoslovakia. German prisoners of war are used to clear minefields and fed less than 1,000 calories a day. They wear a white armband with the letter “N,” for “Nemec,” meaning “German.”

Great Britain. 110,000 German prisoners of war continue to work in the country.