Vietnam War
A long Cold War conflict ends with the fall of Saigon
The war between North Vietnam, backed by the USSR and China, and South Vietnam, backed above all by the United States, was one of the longest conflicts of the Cold War. US troops left in 1973, and in 1975 Saigon fell and the country was reunified.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 16 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 8 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 7 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 6 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 25 years later
Europe
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 22 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 19 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 14 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 2 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 2 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 14 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 13 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 10 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 2 years later
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 6 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 23 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 7 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 24 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 25 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 1 year later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 3 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 5 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 8 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 12 years later
Americas
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — same year
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — 4 years later
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 5 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 14 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 15 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 19 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 14 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 13 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 1 year earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 4 years later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 81)
- Albert Einstein (aged 76)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 74)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 66)
- Mao Zedong (aged 62)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 37)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 26)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 25)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 21)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 71)