Cuban missile crisis 1962
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins on October 14, 1962, bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba-capable of carrying nuclear warheads-were now stationed 90 miles off the American coastline. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union over Cuba had been steadily increasing since the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in which Cuban refugees, armed and trained by the United States, landed in Cuba and attempted to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.
King wins peace prize 1964
African American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America. At 35 years of age, the Georgia-born minister was the youngest person ever to receive the award. Martin Luther King, Jr, was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organised the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated non-violent civil disobedience to racial segregation.
Krushchev out 1964
Nikita Khrushchev is ousted as both premier of the Soviet Union and chief of the
Communist Party after 10 years in power. He was succeeded as head of the Communist Party by his former protégé Leonid Brezhnev, who would eventually become the chief of state as well.
The new Soviet leadership increased military aid to the North Vietnamese without trying to persuade them to attempt a negotiated end to hostilities. With this support and no external pressure to negotiate, the North Vietnamese leadership was free to carry on the war as they saw fit.
Source: History.com