1949: Events and Inventions

January, 1949. New micro-groove 45-rpm records are invented in the United States.

March 18, 1949. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is formed by agreement between twelve countries: the United States, Britain, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The purpose of the alliance is “mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.” NATO is primarily a response to the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe and the growing perceived threat from the Soviet Union. The North Atlantic Treaty is actually signed on April 4th.

'Ireland as seen by NASA Earth Observatory' photo (c) 2005, Irish Typepad - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/April, 1949. The newly proclaimed Republic of Ireland (not including Northern Ireland) leaves the United Kingdom Commonwealth.

May 12, 1949. The Soviet Union lifts its blockade of Berlin.

May 23, 1949. Dr. Konrad Adenauer becomes the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). West Germany consists of the American, French, and British zones of occupation, but not the Soviet zone of occupation which is formed by Stalin into a communist state called the German Democratic Republic in October.

July, 1949. The Pope declares that supporters of communism will be excommunicated from the faith as communists and social democrats vie for political control in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.

August 29, 1949. The USSR tests its first atomic bomb, built partly as a result of secrets stolen from the U.S. nuclear program. Klaus Fuchs, a German-British theoretical physicist and atomic spy, is convicted in 1950 of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research (the Manhattan Project) to the USSR.

October 1, 1949. Mao Zedong declares the civil war in China to be over and the new People’s Republic of China to be the legitimate government of the country. Nationalist Chinese, led by Chiang Kai-shek, are not welcome as part of Mao’s new republic and will be expelled from mainland China to the island of Taiwan.

'Bali Indonesia' photo (c) 2010, John Y. Can - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/October 16, 1949. The Greek civil war, which began in 1944 when the Nazi army pulled out of Greece, is over. The Greeks have defeated Communist guerrilla fighters to establish a democratic government, but the war has left the country bitterly divided still because of the atrocities committed by both sides during the civil war.

December, 1949. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands grant Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies, independence and sovereignty. Sukarno is elected president of the Republic of Indonesia.

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