The Antarctic Treaty
A whole continent declared a zone of peace and science
On 1 December 1959 in Washington, twelve nations, including the USSR and the US at the height of the Cold War, signed the Antarctic Treaty. It banned military bases, manoeuvres and nuclear explosions there, froze territorial claims and opened the continent to free scientific research. The 1991 Madrid Protocol added a ban on mining. More than 50 countries are now parties to it.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 20 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 12 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 11 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 10 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 21 years later
Europe
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 23 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 18 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 6 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 2 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 2 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 18 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 17 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 14 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 2 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 2 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 11 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 20 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 21 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 3 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 1 year earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 1 year later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 4 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 8 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 14 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 6 years earlier
- 1955–1975 Vietnam War — 4 years earlier
- 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward — 1 year earlier
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 16 years later
Americas
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — same year
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 1 year later
- 1969 Moon landing — 10 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 11 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 24 years later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 85)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 78)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 70)
- Mao Zedong (aged 66)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 41)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 30)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 29)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 25)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 75)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 70)