First Soviet atomic bomb test
The US nuclear monopoly ends and the arms race speeds up
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On 29 August 1949 the RDS-1 bomb was tested at the Semipalatinsk Test Site. The USSR became the second nuclear power after the United States, ending the US atomic monopoly and accelerating the arms race.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 10 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 4 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 2 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 1 year earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — same year
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 21 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 16 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 13 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 8 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 4 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 17 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 1 year earlier
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 14 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 7 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 9 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 11 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 14 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 4 years earlier
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 2 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of the People's Republic of China — same year
- 1950–1953 Korean War — 1 year later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 4 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 20 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 4 years earlier
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 2 years earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 20 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 21 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 13 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 8 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 7 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 5 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 10 years later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 75)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 71)
- Albert Einstein (aged 70)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 68)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 60)
- Mao Zedong (aged 56)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 31)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 20)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 19)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 15)