Download PDF - St. Catherine's College - University of Oxford
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THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY<br />
The World <strong>of</strong> 1962<br />
Our first cohort <strong>of</strong> <strong>College</strong> students arrived<br />
in October 1962. Fifty years on, our Fellow<br />
in History, Marc Mulholland, examines the<br />
explosive world around them.<br />
World War Two was still very much a living<br />
memory. Adolph Eichmann, having been<br />
found guilty <strong>of</strong> playing a crucial role in<br />
orchestrating the murder <strong>of</strong> Europe’s Jews,<br />
was executed in Israel on 31 May.<br />
There was much fear <strong>of</strong> the next war. Testing<br />
<strong>of</strong> nuclear weapons in the atmosphere was<br />
still common. An H-Bomb detonated by the<br />
Americans near Christmas Island exploded<br />
with the strength <strong>of</strong> two million tons <strong>of</strong><br />
TNT. The flash was seen in New Zealand,<br />
four thousand miles distant. By the Nassau<br />
Agreement, Britain accepted American Polaris<br />
missiles as its nuclear deterrent.<br />
Human civilisation came closer to destruction<br />
than at any time since the Black Death in the<br />
Fourteenth-Century. In mid-October, American<br />
U-2 spy planes flying over Cuba spotted<br />
ballistic missile sites under construction. The<br />
Cuban Castro regime was preparing to station<br />
Soviet nuclear weaponry in a bid to ward <strong>of</strong>f<br />
US threats <strong>of</strong> invasion. President Kennedy<br />
imposed a ‘quarantine’ – or naval blockade<br />
– on Cuba to prevent the Soviets landing<br />
missiles. Cuba called up more than a quarter<br />
<strong>of</strong> a million army reserves, and the Soviet<br />
forces on the island, with their nucleartipped<br />
tactical missiles, were placed on full<br />
alert. The world teetered on the brink <strong>of</strong><br />
catastrophe. After a tense stand-<strong>of</strong>f between<br />
the superpowers, during which the US<br />
contemplated escalation towards war, on 27<br />
October the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev<br />
agreed to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba<br />
in return for a subsequent, unpublicised,<br />
removal <strong>of</strong> American missiles from Turkey.<br />
President John F Kennedy, meanwhile, was<br />
being sucked into the Vietnam quagmire. By<br />
the end <strong>of</strong> the year, some 10,000 American<br />
troops were deployed in South Vietnam in an<br />
attempt to bolster the government against<br />
Communist insurgency. The US Air Force<br />
began dropping US Agent Orange, a highly<br />
toxic defoliant designed to expose roads and<br />
trails used by Communist forces.<br />
Mao Zedong, who had been side-lined after<br />
his disastrous role in promoting the ‘Great<br />
Leap Forward’ scheme that had turned<br />
agriculture upside-down, began to campaign<br />
against ‘capitalist roaders’ in the Chinese<br />
Communist Party Leadership. This was soon<br />
to lead to the paroxysms <strong>of</strong> the ‘Great<br />
Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.<br />
This was still a ‘western world’. The United<br />
<strong>St</strong>ates and the European Economic Community<br />
(still excluding the UK) supplied 80% <strong>of</strong> the<br />
world’s trade. The age <strong>of</strong> empire was ending,<br />
however. Algeria won its independence from<br />
France, after years <strong>of</strong> bloody conflict, when<br />
President de Gaulle agreed to a transfer <strong>of</strong><br />
power to the Front de Liberation Nationale.<br />
Most Europeans fled the new state, and De<br />
Gaulle survived two assassination attempts by<br />
outraged French nationalists.<br />
The struggle for civil rights was continuing in<br />
the US. As the first cohort <strong>of</strong> Catz students<br />
26/THE WORLD OF 1962