1953

Events

January

• January 6 - The Asian Socialist Conference opens in Rangoon, Burma.
• January 12 - Estonian émigrés found a government-in-exile in Oslo.
• January 13
• * At a magistrate's Court in West Virginia, 47-year-old "turned himself into a "human bomb" with sticks of dynamite strapped to his waist. He killed himself and injured his ex-wife and her lawyer.
• January 14
• * Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Yugoslavia.
• * The CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel first meets to discuss the UFO phenomenon.
• January 15
• * Georg Dertinger, foreign minister of East Germany, is arrested for spying.
• * British security forces in West Germany arrest 7 members of the Naumann Circle, a clandestine Neo-Nazi organization.
• January 19 - 71.1% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy, to watch Lucy give birth to Little Ricky, which is more people than those who tune into Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration the next day.
• January 24
• * Mau Mau Uprising: Rebels in Kenya kill the Ruck family.
• * Leader of East Germany Walter Ulbricht announces that agriculture will be collectivized in East Germany.
• January 31–February 1 - The North Sea flood of 1953 kills 1,836 people in the southwestern Netherlands, 307 in the United Kingdom, and several hundred at sea, including 133 on the ferry in the Irish Sea.

  February

• February 1 - The surge of the North Sea flood continues from the previous day.
• February 3 - Batepá massacre: Hundreds of native creoles, known as forros, are massacred in São Tomé, by the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners.
• February 11
• * United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower refuses a clemency appeal for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
• * The Soviet Union breaks diplomatic relations with Israel, after a bomb explodes at the Soviet Embassy, in reaction to the 'Doctors' plot'.
• February 12 - The Nordic Council is inaugurated.
• February 13 - Transsexual Christine Jorgensen returns to New York after successful sex reassignment surgery in Denmark.
• February 19 - Georgia approves the first literature censorship board in the United States.
• February 28
• * James Watson and Francis Crick of Britain's University of Cambridge announce their discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule.
• * Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia sign the Balkan Pact.

  March

• March 1
• * Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke, after an all-night dinner with Soviet Union interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev. The stroke paralyzes the right side of his body and renders him unconscious until his death on March 5.
• * Bernard Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg is made deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle.
• March 6 - Georgy Malenkov succeeds Joseph Stalin, as Premier and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
• March 8 - The Thieves World, which has been transformed into the Russian mafia, are freed from prisons by the Malenkov regime, ending the Bitch Wars.
• March 13 - The United Nations Security Council nominates Dag Hammarskjöld from Sweden as United Nations Secretary General.
• March 17 - The first nuclear test of Operation Upshot–Knothole is conducted in Nevada, with 1,620 spectators at.
• March 18 - The Yenice–Gönen earthquake affects western Turkey, with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX, causing at least 1,070 deaths, and $3.57 million in damage.
• March 19 - The 25th Academy Awards Ceremony is held.
• March 25–26 - Lari Massacre in Kenya: Mau Mau rebels kill up to 150 Kikuyu natives.
• March 26 - Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine.
• March 29 - A fire at the Littlefield Nursing Home in Largo, Florida, kills 33 persons, including singer-songwriter Arthur Fields.

  April

• April 7 - Dag Hammarskjöld is elected Secretary-General of the United Nations.
• April 8 - Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to 7 years in prison for the alleged organization of the Mau Mau Uprising in the British Kenya Colony.
• April 16
• * President Eisenhower delivers his "Chance for Peace" speech, to the National Association of Newspaper Editors.
• * The Habar Corporation's building in Chicago, United States, catches fire, killing 35 employees.
• April 25 - Francis Crick and James Watson publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", their description of the double helix structure of DNA.

  May

• May 2 - Hussein is crowned King of Jordan.
• May 5 - Aldous Huxley first tries the psychedelic hallucinogen mescaline, inspiring his book The Doors of Perception.
• May 9
• * France agrees to the provisional independence of Cambodia, with King Norodom Sihanouk.
• * Australian Senate election, 1953: The Liberal/Country Coalition Government, led by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, holds their Senate majority, despite gains made by the Labor Party, led by H. V. Evatt. This is the first occasion where a Senate election is held without an accompanying House of Representatives election.
• May 11 - Waco tornado outbreak: An F5 tornado hits in the downtown section of Waco, Texas, killing 114.
• May 15 - The Standards And Recommended Practices for Aeronautical Information Service are adopted by the ICAO Council. These SARPS are in Annex 15 to the Chicago Convention, and 15 May is celebrated by the AIS community as "World AIS Day".
• May 18 - At Rogers Dry Lake, Californian Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to exceed Mach 1, in a North American F-86 Sabre at.
• May 20–21 - A tornado outbreak tears through Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario, leaving eight people dead and 123 people injured.
• May 25 - Nuclear testing: At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its only nuclear artillery test: Upshot-Knothole Grable.
• May 29 - 1953 British Mount Everest expedition: Sir Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay from Nepal become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

  June

• June 1 - Uprising in Plzeň: Currency reform causes riots in Czechoslovakia.
• June 2 - Elizabeth II is crowned Queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms, at Westminster Abbey.
• June 7 - Italian general election: the Christian Democracy party wins a plurality in both legislative houses.
• June 7–9 - Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence: A single storm-system spawns 46 tornadoes of various sizes, in 10 states from Colorado to Massachusetts, over 3 days, killing 246.
• June 8
• * On the second day of the Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence, a tornado kills 116 in Flint, Michigan; it will be the last to claim more than 100 lives, until the 2011 Joplin tornado.
• * Austria and the Soviet Union open diplomatic relations.
• June 9
• * On the third day of the Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence, a tornado spawned from the same storm system as the Flint tornado the day before hits in Worcester, Massachusetts, killing 94.
• * CIA Technical Services Staff head Sidney Gottlieb approves of the use of LSD in an MKUltra subproject.
• June 13 - Hungarian Prime Minister Mátyás Rákosi is replaced by Imre Nagy.
• June 17 - Workers' Uprising in East Germany: The Soviet Union orders a Division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.
• June 18
• * Egypt declares itself a republic.
• * Tachikawa air disaster: A United States Air Force Douglas C-124 Globemaster II crashes just after takeoff from Tachikawa Airfield near Tokyo, Japan, killing all 129 people on board in the worst air crash in history up to this time, and the first with a confirmed death toll exceeding 100.
• June 30 - The first roll-on/roll-off ferry crossing of the English Channel, Dover-Boulogne, takes place.

  July

• July 3 - The first ascent of Nanga Parbat in the Pakistan Himalayas, the world's ninth highest mountain, is made by Austrian climber Hermann Buhl alone on a German–Austrian expedition.
• July 9
• * The U.S. Treasury formally renames the Bureau of Internal Revenue; the new name is the Internal Revenue Service.
• * Inauguration of the south lane of the Rodovia Anchieta.
• July 10 - The Soviet official newspaper Pravda announces that Lavrentiy Beria has been deposed as head of the NKVD.
• July 17 - The greatest recorded loss of United States midshipmen in a single event results from an aircraft crash near NAS Whiting Field.
• July 26 - Fidel Castro and his brother lead a disastrous assault on the Moncada Barracks, preliminary to the Cuban Revolution.
• July 27 - The Korean War ends, with the Korean Armistice Agreement: The United Nations Command , China and North Korea sign an armistice agreement at Panmunjom, and the north remains communist, while the south remains capitalist. No formal peace treaty is ever signed.

  August

• August 5 - Operation Big Switch: Prisoners of war are repatriated to the United States after the Korean War.
• August 8 - Soviet prime minister Georgi Malenkov announces that the Soviet Union has a hydrogen bomb.
• August 12
• * The 1953 Ionian earthquake of magnitude 7.2 totally devastates Cephalonia and most of the other Ionian Islands, in Greece's worst natural disaster in centuries.
• * Soviet atomic bomb project: "Joe 4", the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon, is detonated at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakh SSR.
• August 13 - Four million workers go on strike in France to protest against austerity measures.
• August 15–19 - Cold War: 1953 Iranian coup d'état - Overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, by Iranian military in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with the support of the United States Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom.
• August 17 - The first planning session of Narcotics Anonymous is held in Southern California.
• August 20 - The French government ousts King Mohammed V of Morocco, and exiles him to Corsica.
• August 22 - The last prisoners are repatriated from Devil's Island to France.
• August 25 - The French general strike ends.
• August - High Arctic relocation of Inuit families by the Government of Canada.