Curated category
War scare
- 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incidentShortly after midnight on the 26th of September 1983, a bunker near Moscow lit up with an alarm that could have ended the world.
- Yuri AndropovYuri Andropov died on the 9th of February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69, after spending barely 15 months as the leader of the Soviet Union.
- Able Archer 83Able Archer 83 was a NATO military exercise that began on the 7th of November 1983, and it nearly ended the world. For five days, military commands across…
- Korean Air Lines Flight 007Korean Air Lines Flight 007 departed Gate 15 of John F. Kennedy International Airport on the night of the 31st of August 1983, bound for Seoul.
- Édouard DaladierÉdouard Daladier was born in Carpentras, a town in the Vaucluse region of France, on the 18th of June 1884. He grew up as the son of a village baker and…
- Trent AffairIn the early 1840s, a boundary dispute between the United States and Great Britain over Oregon nearly sparked war. British leaders in London grew…
- 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'étatThe 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état unfolded in a single week in late February, turning the last liberal democracy in Eastern Europe into a…
- Remilitarisation of the RhinelandThe Rhineland, a region stretching along the western bank of the Rhine River, became the focal point of European security after World War I.
- Xi'an IncidentThe Xi'an Incident began in the early hours of the 12th of December 1936, when a Chinese general sent hundreds of soldiers to storm a resort complex in…
- Cuban Missile CrisisThe Cuban Missile Crisis lasted exactly 13 days in October 1962, and during those 13 days, the world's two nuclear superpowers came closer to destroying each…
- Stanislav PetrovStanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was alone at a command console when the Soviet Union's most sensitive nuclear early-warning system told him the world was about…
- Sino-Soviet border conflictIn 1964, the Chinese government revisited border demarcations originally imposed upon the Qing dynasty by the Russian Empire through unequal treaties.
- 1939 German ultimatum to LithuaniaOn the 20th of March 1939, Lithuania's foreign minister Juozas Urbšys walked into a meeting in Berlin that would end with his country losing its only window…
- Berlin BlockadeThe Berlin Blockade began at one minute past midnight on the 24th of June 1948, when Stalin ordered Soviet troops to cut every railway, road, and canal…
- Richard SorgeRichard Sorge arrived in Yokohama on the 6th of September 1933, carrying press credentials from the most prestigious newspaper in Germany and a Nazi Party…