1960s Timeline

June 9, 1962 - Former President Truman (pictured on his birthday last month) went on the radio today to brand as a lie a Soviet propaganda charge that he had initiated the nuclear arms race. The wartime Commander in Chief replied to a Moscow radio broadcast that said the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary and inhuman. The broadcast had also said that the bombings were undertaken to intimidate revolutionaries and to influence Soviet decisions on the peace

Sept. 15, 1961 - The United States resumed atomic testing today by setting off a small underground explosion in Nevada. It was the first atomic weapons test by the U.S. since Oct. 30, 1958, when testing was voluntarily suspended in a futile attempt to reach a test-ban agreement with the Soviet Union. In announcing the explosion, President Kennedy (pictured at the Vienna Summit with Premier Khrushchev in June) said the U.S. had been "forced reluctantly" to renew testing becaus

Sept. 15, 1961 - President Kennedy is spurring Americans to build home fallout shelters to cut the nation's losses in case of nuclear war. But of 14 high officials who sit with Mr. Kennedy on the National Security Council or in his Cabinet, none has built a shelter. The White House has an elaborate bomb shelter, built during the Truman Administration. Mr. Kennedy has several secret shelters available within a 2-hour drive or a 20-minute helicopter trip from Washington. Vice P

Sept. 6, 1961 - The Atomic Energy Commission announced today that the Soviet Union had detonated a fourth nuclear device in the atmosphere. A brief announcement said the explosion took place this morning east of Stalingrad. Stalingrad, in southeast European Russia, is an industrial and agricultural area, but several hundred miles to the east there are areas of sparsely populated desert. Traces of radioactive fallout from the earlier Asian blasts have been detected in Alaska,

Aug. 1, 1961 - Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara said today that 50 million usable shelter spaces could provide a "Spartan" minimum existence for one-fourth of the U.S. population. This does not mean that 50 million lives would be saved in the event of a nuclear attack, he stressed, since millions in shelters would die from blast, heat and immediate radiation effects. But he said such shelters could save as many as 15 million lives. Local officials, Mr. McNamara said, "sho