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