Part 2: Days that shook the world

Days that shook the world cont'd

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki :

August 6 and August 9, 1945

In August 1945, during the final stage of the Second World War, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history.

As the Second World War entered its sixth and final year, the Allies had begun to prepare for what was anticipated to be a very costly invasion of the Japanese mainland. This was preceded by an immensely destructive firebombing campaign that obliterated many Japanese cities. The war in Europe had concluded when Nazi Germany signed its instrument of surrender on May 8, 1945, but with the Japanese refusal to accept the Allies' demands for unconditional surrender, the Pacific War dragged on. Together with the United Kingdom and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945; this was buttressed with the threat of "prompt and utter destruction".

A uranium gun-type atomic bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on the city of Nagasaki on August 9. Little Boy exploded 2,000 feet above Hiroshima in a blast equal to 12-15,000 tons of TNT, destroying five square miles of the city. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects of the atomic bombings killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 in Nagasaki; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day.

Space exploration/Moon landing:

The launch of the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, the USSR's Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957, and the first Moon landing by the American Apollo 11 craft on 20 July 1969 are often taken as landmarks for this initial period.

The first man in orbit: Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1  on 12 April 1961

The first spacewalk: by Aleksei Leonov  on 18 March 1965

The moon landing: A moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both manned and unmanned (robotic) missions. The first human-made object to reach the surface of the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2 mission, on 13 September 1959.

The United States' Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon, on 20 July 1969.There have been six manned U.S. landings (between 1969 and 1972) and numerous unmanned landings, with no soft landings happening from 22 August 1976 until 14 December 2013. To date, the United States is the only country to have successfully conducted manned missions to the Moon.

Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also an aerospace engineer, naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor

Chernobyl disaster

26 April 1986

The disaster began during a systems test on Saturday, 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the city of Pripyat and in proximity to the administrative border with Belarus and the Dnieper River. There was a sudden and unexpected power surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, an exponentially larger spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of steam explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite. The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.According to official post-Soviet data,about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.

Pan Am Flight 103 (Lockerbie Bombing)

21 December 1988

Pan Am Flight 103 was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit, via London and New York, that was destroyed by a terrorist bomb on Wednesday, 21 December 1988, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew on board, in what became known as the Lockerbie bombing. Large sections of the aircraft crashed onto residential areas of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 more people on the ground.

 

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

December 26, 1991

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was formally enacted on December 26, 1991, as a result of the declaration no. 142-Н of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union,acknowledging the independence of the erstwhile Soviet republics and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – although five of the signatories ratified it much later or not at all. On the previous day, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, resigned, declared his office extinct, and handed over its powers – including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes – to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. That evening at 7:32 p.m., the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian Flag.

Invasion of Kuwait

2–4 August 1990

The Invasion of Kuwait, also known as the Iraq–Kuwait War, was a major conflict between Ba'athist Iraq and the Emirate of Kuwait, which resulted in the seven-month-long Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and subsequently led to direct military intervention by US-led forces in the Gulf War and the setting alight by Iraq of 600 Kuwaiti oil wells.

September 11 attacks

September 11, 2001

The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th, or 9/11) were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the United States in New York City, New York, and Arlington County, Virginia, on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Four passenger airliners which all departed from the U.S. East Coast to California were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists to be flown into buildings in suicide attacks. Two of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within two hours, both 110-story towers collapsed with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the WTC complex, including the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures. 

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster

11 March 2011

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disasterwas a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant that began on 11 March 2011 and resulted in a nuclear meltdown of three of the plant's six nuclear reactors.

The failure occurred when the plant was hit by a tsunami that had been triggered by the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake. The following day, 12 March, substantial amounts of radioactive material began to be released, creating the largest nuclear incident since the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986 and the only (after Chernobyl) to measure Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (initially releasing an estimated 10–30% of the earlier incident's radioactivity)