The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
French spies bombed a Greenpeace ship in a foreign port
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On the night of 10 July 1985 two mines sank Greenpeace's flagship in Auckland harbour as it prepared to sail to Moruroa to protest French nuclear tests. Photographer Fernando Pereira was killed. New Zealand police soon caught two agents of the French DGSE, and the scandal cost Defence Minister Charles Hernu his post. New Zealand hardened its nuclear-free stance.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 5 years earlier
- 2008 Global financial crisis — 23 years later
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 4 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 4 years later
- 1990 German reunification — 5 years later
- 1991–2001 Yugoslav Wars — 6 years later
- 1992 Maastricht Treaty — 7 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 24 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — same year
- 1986 Chernobyl disaster — 1 year later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 4 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 6 years later
Middle East
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 6 years earlier
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 5 years earlier
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 5 years later
Africa
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 18 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 18 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 11 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 2 years earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 9 years later
Asia
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 10 years earlier
- 1984 Bhopal disaster — 1 year earlier
- 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — 4 years later
- 1991 Eruption of Mount Pinatubo — 6 years later
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami — 19 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 16 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 15 years earlier
- 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens — 5 years earlier
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 2 years earlier
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 16 years later
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 67)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 55)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 86)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 84)
- Mother Teresa (aged 75)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 74)
- Richard Nixon (aged 72)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 66)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 61)
- Fidel Castro (aged 59)