On this day

1720 – Caribbean pirate Calico Jack is captured by the Royal Navy. He is most remembered for two things: the design of his Jolly Roger flag, a skull with crossed swords, which contributed to the popularization of the design, and for having two female crew members (Mary Read and Rackham's lover Anne Bonny).

1827 – Battle of Navarino – a combined Turkish and Egyptian armada is defeated by British, French, and Russian naval force in the port of Navarino in Pylos, Greece.

1883 – Peru and Chile sign the Treaty of Ancón, by which the Tarapacá province is ceded to the latter, bringing an end to Peru's involvement in the War of the Pacific.

1904 – Chile and Bolivia sign the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, delimiting the border between the two countries.

1944 – General Douglas MacArthur fulfills his promise to return to the Philippines when he commands an Allied assault on the islands, reclaiming them from the Japanese during the Second World War.

1961 – The Soviet Union performs the first armed test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile, launching an R-13 from a Golf class submarine.

1968 – Former First Lady (FLOTUS) Jacqueline Kennedy marries Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

1973 – The Sydney Opera House opens. It was conceived and largely built by Danish architect Jørn Utzon.

1977 – A plane carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd crashes in Mississippi, killing lead singer Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines along with backup singer Cassie Gaines, the road manager, pilot, and co-pilot.

1991 – A 6.8 Mw earthquake strikes the Uttarkashi region of India, killing more than 1,000 people.

2011 – The former leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, and his son Mutassim Gaddafi are killed shortly after the Battle of Sirte while in the custody of NTC fighters.

1097 – First Crusade: Crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto, and Raymond IV of Toulouse, begin the Siege of Antioch.

1600 – Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats the leaders of rival Japanese clans in the Battle of Sekigahara, which marks the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate that in effect rules Japan until the mid-nineteenth century.

1805 – Battle of Trafalgar: A British fleet led by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson defeats a combined French and Spanish fleet off the coast of Spain under Admiral Villeneuve. It signals almost the end of French maritime power and leaves Britain's navy unchallenged until the 20th century.

1816 – The Penang Free School is founded in George Town, Penang, Malaysia, by the Rev Hutchings. It is the oldest English-language school in Southeast Asia.

1854 – Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses are sent to the Crimean War.

1910 – HMS Niobe arrives in Halifax Harbour to become the first ship of the Royal Canadian Navy.

1944 – World War II: The first kamikaze attack: A Japanese plane carrying a 200-kilogram (440 lb) bomb attacks HMAS Australia off Leyte Island, as the Battle of Leyte Gulf began.

1944 – World War II: Battle of Aachen: The city of Aachen falls to American forces after three weeks of fighting, making it the first German city to fall to the Allies.

1956 – Kenyan rebel leader Dedan Kimathi is captured by the British Army, signalling the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau Uprising, and essentially ending the British military campaign.

1959 – In New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens to the public.

1966 – Aberfan disaster: A slag heap collapses on the village of Aberfan in Wales, killing 144 people, mostly schoolchildren.

1971 – A gas explosion kills 22 people at a shopping centre in Clarkston, East Renfrewshire, near Glasgow, Scotland.

1977 – The European Patent Institute is founded.

1978 – Australian civilian pilot Frederick Valentich vanishes in a Cessna 182 over the Bass Strait south of Melbourne, after reporting contact with an unidentified aircraft.

1983 – The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

1987 – Jaffna hospital massacre is carried out by Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka killing 70 ethnic Tamil patients, doctors and nurses.

1994 – In Seoul, 32 people are killed when the Seongsu Bridge collapses.

2003 – Images of the dwarf planet Eris are taken and subsequently used in documenting its discovery by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz.

1633 – Battle of southern Fujian sea: The Ming dynasty defeats the Dutch East India Company.

1707 – Scilly naval disaster: four British Royal Navy ships run aground near the Isles of Scilly because of faulty navigation. Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell and thousands of sailors drown.

1790 – Warriors of the Miami tribe under Chief Little Turtle defeat United States troops under General Josiah Harmar at the site of present-day Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the Northwest Indian War.

1797 – One thousand meters (3,200 feet) above Paris, André-Jacques Garnerin makes the first recorded parachute jump.

1877 – The Blantyre mining disaster in Scotland kills 207 miners.

1879 – Using a filament of carbonized thread, Thomas Edison tests the first practical electric incandescent light bulb (it lasted 13½ hours before burning out).

1910 – Dr. Crippen is convicted at the Old Bailey of poisoning his wife and is subsequently hanged at Pentonville Prison in London.

1943 – World War II: in the Second firestorm raid on Germany, the Royal Air Force conducts an air raid on the town of Kassel, killing 10,000 and rendering 150,000 homeless.

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: US President John F. Kennedy, after internal counsel from Dwight D. Eisenhower, announces that American reconnaissance planes have discovered Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, and that he has ordered a naval "quarantine" of the Communist nation.

1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turns down the honor.

1975 – The Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 lands on Venus.

1976 – Red Dye No. 4 is banned by the US Food and Drug Administration after it is discovered that it causes tumors in the bladders of dogs. The dye is still used in Canada.

1983 - Two correctional officers are killed by inmates at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. The incident inspires the Supermax model of prisons.

2008 – India launches its first unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-1, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

(22-10-2012 11:50 )skully Wrote:  1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: US President John F. Kennedy, after internal counsel from Dwight D. Eisenhower, announces that American reconnaissance planes have discovered Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, and that he has ordered a naval "quarantine" of the Communist nation.

During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States' DEFCON system reached the highest level ever known to have been used. It is probably the closest (although there have been many notable other incidents) that the world has come to all out nuclear war.

I've prepared an in depth post on the DEFCON alert scale, which I was going to post seperately on 1st November. However, I've decided to post it here as it's relevant to Skully's post and because the exact date of creation of DEFCON is uncertain:-

DEFCON Alert Status

Created in November 1959, the United States' DEFCON system (Defense Readiness Condition) is a 5 tier alert status scale used to reflect the state of readiness of the US armed forces to possible nuclear and terrorist attacks. It was developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US government in collaboration with the Unified Combatant Command. The system allows different sections of the US military to be placed at different levels simultaneously, as some intelligence received by officials may be of specific relevance to just certain branches of the armed forces.

Levels

Obviously, precise details of operations taking place under each level remain classified and weapons capability has varied over the years as new technology continues to be developed. Each of the five levels has a unique term and colour to identify it for security reasons and for use in training exercises / drills. These are to distinguish between training drills and actual operations, thus avoiding confusion between an exercise and an actual event. The five "exercise terms" have been in use since at least 1960, when they were used in a North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) training exercise. They each relate to an actual code word used in US military operations. The five levels, together with their colour and exercise term ID are listed below:-

DEFCON 5 - "Fade Out"; lowest state of readiness; normal, blue

DEFCON 4 - "Double Take"; increased intelligence watch & strengthened security; above normal, green

DEFCON 3 - "Round House"; increased force readiness; medium, yellow

DEFCON 2 - "Fast Pace"; next step to war; war readiness, red

DEFCON 1 - "Cocked Pistol"; nuclear war imminent; maximum, white

Several examples of nuclear war fiction have mistook DEFCON 5 to mean "go to DEFCON 5" as in go to a state of emergency. In fact, 5 is the lowest level. 1 is the maximum and has never been known to be used.

The closest the world ever came to all out nuclear war...?

On 26th October 1962, the DEFCON system reached the highest level ever known to have been used. US Strategic Air Command units were ordered by president John F Kennedy to move to DEFCON 2, as the Cuban missile crisis reached near breaking point. This was just one level away from what would have been certain nuclear war.

For a lot of the Cold War, US ICBM missile sites remained at DEFCON 4 rather than 5.

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, all US armed forces were unoffically at DEFCON 3.

During the 11th September 2001 terror attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered an increase to DEFCON 3 and be ready for a further increase to DEFCON 2, which was eventually not needed.

In any event, the DEFCON system is controlled primarily by the president and secretary of defense, in collaboration with the chairman of the joint chiefs and division commanders of each military branch. The United Kingdom equivalent to DEFCON is the UK Threat Level, which replaced the 'Bikini State'.

Popular Culture

DEFCON was used in the films WarGames, Independence Day, The Sum of All Fears, Crimson Tide, Armageddon, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, Stargate SG-1 and The West Wing, among many others.

The real-time strategy game DEFCON simulates the outbreak of thermonuclear war, and advances through the DEFCON levels as each match progresses.

In the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops the Zombies mode map "five" allows a special area to be unlocked if players cooperate to lower the DEFCON level from 1 to 5.

Some internet relay chat services (IRC) such as Anope provide a DEFCON system defining several pre-set configurations to be enabled during an attempted attack on an IRC network.

Hard dance organisation, Q-Dance hosts the yearly Defqon.1 Festival. The logo ironically is a peace sign.

links to further reading below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Threat_Levels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

1906 – Alberto Santos-Dumont flies an airplane in the first heavier-than-air flight in Europe at Champs de Bagatelle, Paris, France.

1911 – First use of aircraft in war: An Italian pilot takes off from Libya to observe Turkish army lines during the Turco-Italian War.

1917 – Lenin calls for the October Revolution.

1935 – Dutch Schultz, Abe Landau, Otto Berman, and Bernard "Lulu" Rosencrantz are fatally shot at a saloon in Newark, New Jersey in what will become known as The Chophouse Massacre.

1941 – World War II: Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov takes command of Red Army operations to prevent the further advance into Russia of German forces and to prevent the Wehrmacht from capturing Moscow.

1942 – World War II: Second Battle of El Alamein: – At El Alamein in northern Egypt, the British Eighth Army under Field Marshal Montgomery begins a critical offensive to expel the Axis armies from Egypt.

1958 – The Smurfs, a fictional race of blue dwarves, later popularized in a Hanna-Barbera animated cartoon series, appear for the first time in the story La flute à six schtroumpfs, a Johan and Peewit adventure by Peyo which is serialized in the weekly comics magazine Spirou.

1970 – Gary Gabelich sets a land speed record in a rocket-powered automobile called the Blue Flame, fueled with natural gas.

1989 – The Hungarian Republic is officially declared by president Mátyás Szűrös, replacing the communist Hungarian People's Republic.

1992 – Emperor Akihito becomes the first Emperor of Japan to stand on Chinese soil.

2001 – Apple announces the iPod.

2002 – Moscow Theatre Siege begins: Chechen terrorists seize the House of Culture theater in Moscow and take approximately 700 theater-goers hostage.

1260 – The spectacular Cathedral of Chartres is dedicated in the presence of King Louis IX of France; the cathedral is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

1360 – The Treaty of Brétigny is ratified at Calais, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years' War.

1851 – William Lassell discovers the moons Umbriel and Ariel orbiting Uranus.

1901 – Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

1926 – Harry Houdini's last performance, which is at the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, Michigan.

1929 – Black Thursday stock market crash on the New York Stock Exchange.

1931 – The George Washington Bridge opens to public traffic.

1945 – Founding of the United Nations.

1946 – A camera on board the V-2 No. 13 rocket takes the first photograph of earth from outer space.

1947 – Walt Disney testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming Disney employees he believes to be communists.

1957 – The USAF starts the X-20 Dyna-Soar program.

1960 – Nedelin catastrophe: An R-16 ballistic missile explodes on the launch pad at the Soviet Union's Baikonur Cosmodrome space facility, killing over 100. Among the dead is Field Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, whose death is reported to have occurred in a plane crash.

1998 – Launch of the Deep Space 1 comet/asteroid mission.

2003 – Concorde makes its last commercial flight.

2007 – Chang'e 1, the first satellite in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, is launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

1415 – The army of Henry V of England defeats the French at the Battle of Agincourt.

1616 – Dutch sea-captain Dirk Hartog makes second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at the later-named Dirk Hartog Island off the West Australian coast.

1760 – George III becomes King of Great Britain.

1828 – The St Katharine Docks opened in London.

1854 – The Battle of Balaklava during the Crimean War (Charge of the Light Brigade).

1944 – The USS Tang under Richard O'Kane (the top American submarine captain of World War II) is sunk by the ship's own malfunctioning torpedo.

1944 – Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history, takes place in and around the Philippines between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Third and U.S. Seventh Fleets.

1962 – Nelson Mandela is sentenced to five years in prison.

1980 – Proceedings on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction conclude at The Hague.

2009 – The 25 October 2009 Baghdad bombings kills 155 and wounds at least 721.

1640 – The Treaty of Ripon is signed, restoring peace between Scotland and Charles I of England.

1813 – War of 1812: Canadians and Mohawks defeat the Americans in the Battle of Chateauguay.

1859 – The Royal Charter is wrecked on the coast of Anglesey, north Wales with 459 dead.

1881 – The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral takes place at Tombstone, Arizona.

1905 – Norway becomes independent from Sweden.

1936 – The first electric generator at Hoover Dam goes into full operation.

1940 – The P-51 Mustang makes its maiden flight.

1943 – World War II: First flight of the Dornier Do 335 Pfeil (Arrow).

1947 – The Maharaja of Kashmir and Jammu agrees to allow his kingdom to join India.

1958 – Pan American Airways makes the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York City to Paris, France.

1964 – Eric Edgar Cooke becomes last person in Western Australia to be executed.

1977 – The last natural case of smallpox is discovered in Merca district, Somalia. The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider this date the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination.

1985 – The Australian government returns ownership of Uluru to the local Pitjantjatjara Aborigines.

1992 – The London Ambulance Service is thrown into chaos after the implementation of a new CAD, or Computer Aided Dispatch, system which failed.

2001 – The United States passes the USA PATRIOT Act into law.

2002 – Moscow Theatre Siege: Approximately 50 Chechen terrorists and 150 hostages die when Russian Spetsnaz storm a theater building in Moscow, which had been occupied by the terrorists during a musical performance three days before.

2003 – The Cedar Fire, the second-largest fire in California history, kills 15 people, consumes 250,000 acres (1,000 km2), and destroys 2,200 homes around San Diego.

2012 – Windows 8 is released to general public, the first version of Windows since 3.11 to lack a Start button/menu.

312 – Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross.

1275 – Traditional date of the founding of the city of Amsterdam.

1553 – Condemned as a heretic, Michael Servetus is burned at the stake just outside Geneva.

1795 – The United States and Spain sign the Treaty of Madrid, which establishes the boundaries between Spanish colonies and the U.S.

1838 – Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, which orders all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated.

1904 – The first underground New York City Subway line opens; the system becomes the biggest in United States, and one of the biggest in world.

1914 – World War I: The British super-dreadnought battleship HMS Audacious (23,400 tons), is sunk off Tory Island, north-west of Ireland, by a minefield laid by the armed German merchant-cruiser Berlin.

1954 – Benjamin O. Davis Jr. becomes the first African-American general in the United States Air Force.

1961 – NASA tests the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.

1981 – The Soviet submarine U 137 runs aground on the east coast of Sweden.

1986 – The British government suddenly deregulates financial markets, leading to a total restructuring of the way in which they operate in the country, in an event now referred to as the Big Bang.

1991 – Turkmenistan achieves independence from the Soviet Union.

1992 – United States Navy radioman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. is brutally murdered by shipmate Terry M. Helvey for being gay, precipitating first military, then national, debate about gays in the military that resulted in the United States "Don't ask, don't tell" military policy.

1994 – Gliese 229B is the first Substellar Mass Object to be unquestionably identified.

1995 – Former Prime Minister of Italy Bettino Craxi is convicted in absentia of corruption.

1999 – Gunmen open fire in the Armenian Parliament, killing Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Parliament Chairman Karen Demirchyan, and 6 other members.

2005 – Riots begin in Paris after the deaths of two Muslim teenagers.

2005 – The SSETI Express micro-satellite is successfully launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

1538 – The first university in the New World, the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, is established.

1628 – The Siege of La Rochelle, which had lasted for 14 months, ends with the surrender of the Huguenots.

1664 – The Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot, later to be known as the Royal Marines, is established.

1835 – The United Tribes of New Zealand is established with the signature of the Declaration of Independence.

1886 – In New York Harbor, President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty.

1891 – The Mino-Owari earthquake, the largest inland earthquake in Japan's history, strikes Gifu Prefecture.

1915 – Richard Strauss conducts the first performance of his tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie in Berlin.

1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.

1940 – World War II: Greece rejects Italy's ultimatum. Italy invades Greece through Albania, marking Greece's entry into World War II.

1942 – The Alaska Highway (Alcan Highway) is completed through Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska.

1948 – Swiss chemist Paul Müller is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT.

1962 – End of Cuban missile crisis: Nikita Khrushchev orders to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba.

1965 – Nostra Aetate, the "Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions" of the Second Vatican Council, is promulgated by Pope Paul VI; it absolves the Jews of responsibility for the death of Jesus, reversing Innocent III's 760 year-old declaration.

1965 – Construction on the St. Louis Arch is completed.

1971 – Britain launches the satellite Prospero into low Earth orbit atop a Black Arrow carrier rocket, the only British satellite to date launched by a British rocket.

1995 – 289 people are killed and 265 injured in Baku Metro fire, the deadliest subway disaster.

2007 – Cristina Fernández de Kirchner becomes the first woman elected President of Argentina.

2009 – NASA successfully launches the Ares I-X mission, the only rocket launch for its later-cancelled Constellation program.