Full list  |  Top Global population: 2.5 billion Olympics: Helsinki, 1952 (4,955 athletes from 69 nations); Melbourne, 1956 (3,314 athletes from 72 nations)

War paraphernalia left from the war did not vanish quickly. Regiments that appeared in a few weeks in the rush-to-fight of the 1940s took years to demobilize, despite their redundancy, and approaching a decade to abolish some garrisons. While all victorious countries kept the cheques flowing the biggest spender was America, which in 1953 committed a colossal 14.2% of GDP to its military – a century-high peak that had dropped nearly fivefold to 3% by 2000. America’s formal peace accord with Japan, the San Francisco Peace Treaty, only appeared in 1951, half-a-dozen years after surrender, but long after MacArthur returned power to the Diet in Tokyo pockets of the Japanese archipelago housed bulky American garrisons. Funded mostly by Washington these still depended on sizeable Japanese land concessions. In effect, not that Tokyo liked such an analogy, a linear US military presence stretched from tiny Okinawa in the south to larger Hokkaido in the north. In the snowy northernmost island was now effectively a nerve-racking border with Soviet troops stationed in Sakhalin. European countries also found themselves saddled with large Allied and American strongholds. The West German garrisons in particular contained a precarious mix of often-bored troops handling elderly tanks plus increasing supplies of the new dread military weapon – tactical nuclear missiles.

Such military largesse seemed either bizarre or wicked to most European countries and many Asian countries facing demanding reconstruction projects plus often uncomfortable social readjustments. Hard-hit Britain, for example, endured rationing until 1954 and conscription until 1960, a full fifteen years after peace. America’s Time Magazine captured this dizzyingly enduring military tone by lauding American troops as their 'Person of the year' in 1950. In 1956, and noting the increasingly tense European frontline between capitalism and communism, the globally circulated magazine applauded Hungarian freedom-fighters. (Oddly, the following year it celebrated USSR Premiere Nikita Khrushchev, the military tormentor of Hungarian freedom-fighters.)

In this climate of continued armament and reluctant adjustment it was unavoidable that something would bubble up. To much relief, however, the bubble did not burst within the tinderbox European theatre. Instead the key miniwar from the 1950s oriented around a divided peninsula south of the Asian land mass. The flames of the Korean Civil War ignited from a go-getting Communist attack in the summer of 1950 (Decisive Day #49, 25/06/1950). So fragile was the south and so gruff was the northern invasion that it took not Koreans but a sizeable United Nations force, under United States leadership, to restore post-war division of the peninsula. Undoubtedly the whole event proved wasteful and futile. After three years of skirmishing, war, dubious peaces, anguish and creating millions of refugees, the status quo reappeared with pro-Communist north divided from pro-capitalist south along the 38th parallel. Probably the only upside was that, despite the tragic waste, Washington, Moscow and Beijing, with various proxies, had discretely come toe-to-toe without a full-scale nuclear Armageddon.

During and after the Korean War years American military planners, flush with what seemed like more money than Croesus, started projects and garrisons in dozens of touchy places where capitalism confronted communism. Some of them were unnecessary and irrelevant as soon as the builders had finished. But others were more important and of these more important jostles one especially made a significant difference in another southern fringe off Asia – Vietnam. The newly set up MAAG office – Military Assistance and Advisory Group – became after its foundation (Decisive Day #50, 03/09/1950) and for fourteen sensitive years a critical conduit for American energy and concentration of military thought. Thought, that is, as far as the Pentagon could overrule the White House. Driving its philosophy was hopes for a single and unified bulwark against Communism, for unlike the divided Korean peninsula Vietnam had emerged united from World War Two.

European powers like France and Britain, sapped of energy, looked with a mix of envy and dismay at the global American posture. Outside the two concentrated trouble spots of Asia – Korea and Vietnam – life in the Old Europe assumed much more humble proportions. Politicians focused on modernizing not just infrastructure but also the claustrophobia of class and hierarchy that still existed. As in the aftermath of the Great War, when a wave of republicanism swept most royal houses away, questions naturally arose if the remaining royal houses could survive this latest war. Questions and curiosity notably focused around British monarchy when a new and young monarch claimed the throne (Decisive Day #51, 02/06/1953). But despite much republican pressure Queen Elizabeth succeeded in injecting a light and modern optimism into an ancient institution. More evolution than revolution it was enough to ensure not just survival of the Windsor bloodline but a flourishing icon of the late twentieth century. With something approaching theatrical juggling the new monarch embraced fresh and more open relations with the media while preserving a prized and venerated place in British society. Plus, for good measure, also forming a new Commonwealth from the often fractions former British Empire.

Seeing the adjustments in British royalty and political life the new capitalist power, America, perhaps not unnaturally, looked with satisfaction at the caustic untangling of Britain’s Empire into the new and much weaker Commonwealth. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles commented in 1954, a year into the new monarchs reign and with thinly disguised merriment at the decolonization embracing the British Empire: ‘We ourselves are the first colony in modern times to have won independence. We have a natural sympathy with those who would follow our example.’ To avoid any doubt of its own colonial practices Washington had already granted Puerto Rico self-governing status, in 1952, and in 1958 formally opened prospects of statehood for Alaska. Anchorage secured statehood in 1967. This is not to say Washington had had two tin ears to London and the British view of world politics. In 1959, British Prime Minister MacMillan painted Premiere Khrushchev an evil mix of Peter the Great, the ancient Russian leader, and Lord Beaverbrook, the British press baron. ‘Ruthless but sentimental’, Mac reckoned, with studied British understatement that attracted ears in Washington and helped ease America into cautious engagement with Stalin’s successor. Still, the odd incident aside, the fundamental tenor in Anglo-American relations was one where America dominated more and Britain increasingly less so. America never stopped sensing and at times celebrating the switch in power and in the early 1960s the American schadenfraude scored a more famous and well-honed wound. Dean Acheson decided that ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.’

Undaunted, post-war Britain and the new British Commonwealth found comfort not in bashing Johnny Foreigners and stealing their land but in more modest but no less compellingly individual accomplishments. Of several new records and other firsts performed in the 1950s mountaineering took special place. A New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary, with Nepali assistant Tenzig Norgay, climbed Mount Everest on the China-Nepal border in 1953, a height around 8,800 meters. London discretely triumphed it as a Commonwealth accomplishment. Soon after British and Commonwealth mountaineers had climbed for the first time many of the great mountains on the Nepal-China Border. Included in the list were Makalu at 8,500 meters, in Pakistan, K2 or Godwin-Austen at 8,600 meters, and in Nepal, Manaslu at 8,200 meters. Sports took more prominence, too. Some pride looked fated given London hosted the first post-war Olympics in 1948 and had invented most of the serious world team sports. In 1966 England hosted and won the football World Cup, defeating West Germany in the final. Not an enduring dominance – of 16 football world cups in the twentieth century British Home Unions won only once – but was enough to stimulate popular victory chants of ‘Two World Wars and one World Cup.’

Sporting and individual accomplishments also helped the new monarch and London grapple with their generally weaker hand and the generally unstellar leaders assuming power in newly independent countries. A couple of years after Queen Elizabeth took the throne Ghana became the first African colony to gain independence and Malaya the first in Asia – both in 1957. The Ghanaian experience was not inspiring until the early 1980s and after relatively steady declines in circumstances, interspersed with several coups, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings introduced a measure of stability and eventually democracy. Other former British colonies in Africa suffered too. To the east of Africa, Uganda gained independence five years after Ghana, in 1962, and suffered from poor leadership before handing over by another military leader with connections to the British military, Idi Amin. During the 1940s the future Ugandan leader served the British Army in the King's African Rifles, starting as private and ending as lieutenant, and during the 1950s was Uganda's light heavyweight boxing champion. Matters went awry on many fronts following the seizure of power in the 1970s. Juniors received instructions to call the former boxing champion 'His Excellency President for Life, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea', 'Big Daddy' and 'King of Scotland'. Perhaps the former had some resonance from precolonised Africa. But claims to be interwoven with the Macbeth bloodline raised a few eyebrows in Kampala and several more in Edinburgh.

Doubtless America would have liked to watch such a decolonizing world with distant but distinct glee. Washington did not nail the luxury. As the Cold War settled on a divided world the American view became increasingly concerned for former colonies turning Communist – and in effect trading one European colonial power for another centred on Moscow. Of several signs to American discomfort with the new Cold War settling around the globe one reached fever pitch not overseas but in Washington with the McCarthyist trials (Decisive Day #52, 25/02/1954). Such an assault on prominent American individuals, looked back on, was irrational exuberance heaped on irrational exuberance. Prominent and less prominent individuals became not just tarred as sympathisers with Communism – perhaps an odd sympathy but still a legitimate political opinion. The accused also became enemies of the state and even enemies of democracy itself. Fervent accusers found nothing irrational in recalling Stalin’s belief that those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything, with implications the accused sought an end to democracy in America. Part of the discomfort which McCarthy caused, and why it is so significant, was insight to an underlying American belief that it alone could be different and apart and uniquely threatened, all in one messy jumble. To this way of thinking it was good news when, in 1954, Ellis Island in New York harbour closed after processing more than twenty million immigrants since opening in 1892. Less immigrants meant more security.

As well as exposing the American fragility and sensitivities about itself as much as Communism McCarthyism also exposed how greater communications were influencing America. Television and radio networks like CBS and NBC had both expanded hugely during World War Two and locked on cheerfully to this latest event. Live broadcasts covered the panel interviews of alleged offenders. Also improved during the 1950s were one-to-one communications where people could reach others directly. Long-distance telephone had appeared as early as 1915 but for many years was frustratingly cumbersome. More manageable direct-dial coast-to-coast telephone service appeared in 1951 and all achievable without operator help. Shortly afterwards the new phones reached the middle of the Pacific in Hawaii – home to the giant naval base of Pearl Harbour – which became the fiftieth American state in 1959. As with immigration the McCarthyist view of improved one-to-one communications was more nervous than satisfaction: it made it easier for spies and subversives to contact each other and raised demands for vigilance.

Perhaps if the energy and bile from quick-to-cry wolf McCarthyism had focused on injustice affecting millions of Americans rather than alleged misdemeanours and high crimes among a few it might have appeared more favourably in the historical record. But it failed to dodge this harsh indictment. As tempers calmed from the Washington hijinx, and early in a chill December 1955, an African-American woman refused to give up her seat to a Caucasian-American. To the wider country and indeed the wider world this answered a biting flaw in America. Was it still true that close to two centuries after declaring all Americans equal segregation still existed? Did blacks have to give up seats deferentially and at the whim of whites?

Following the arrest of Rosa Parks for violating racial segregation laws – a white-dominated court fined her US$10 for her troubles plus costs – came the Montgomery Bus Boycott. As with the McCarthy trials, television and radio coverage rocketed and often enflamed matters pointlessly. This time, though, protests around Montgomery captured the consciousness of blacks not just in Alabama’s capital. It also set up new generation of social and political leaders. Prominent among this cluster was a young Christian minister, Martin Luther King, who soon became a central figure in civil rights movement and looked to by many civic leaders. When, in November of 1956, the United States Supreme Court declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws segregating bus seating illegal, it was Dr King the media looked to for a vox pop. The tragedy of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was that it had to happen at all, he obliged.

Fittingly enough when the feisty Ms Parks died in 2005 the American landscape had fundamentally changed from the 1950s. In the intervening years the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 had become central to modern America. Reflecting the resulting transformation church memorials for Ms Parks happened not only in Alabama and Detroit (where Ms Parks lived afterwards) but also Washington. As the Whitehouse flag flew at half mast the American Secretary of State, African-American Dr Condoleezza Rice, commented that Rosa Parks helped her achieve high office. Erecting a statue in her honour President George W Bush added: ‘By placing her statue in the heart of the nation's Capitol, we commemorate her work for a more perfect union, and we commit ourselves to continue to struggle for justice for every American.’ Such high honours when courts fined Ms Parks US$10 for taking a white seat were scarcely imaginable.

Meanwhile in Indo-China and fading nearly as fast as ice cream in tropical sun stood French hopes the American MAAG office would supply American materiel and cash and political support. French troops in south-east Asia were, after all, struggling against Communism. Surely the enemy of my friend is my enemy too? Not so, America decided, returning to a persistent unease at the whole European imperial venture. The defeat of poorly led French troops in an obscure north-western stronghold called Dien Bien Phu (Decisive Day #53, 08/05/1954) looked of little strategic threat to either Hanoi in the north or Saigon in the south. Yet, individuals in MAAG and in Washington spotted the surrender revealed French impotence beyond urban bastions. Within a few months the country divided. France exited their last sizeable Asian colony and passed southern Vietnam to America, symbolically if not legally. The American effort to support France’s fragile if fervent anticommunist state below the 17th parallel dominated an inglorious Civil War for two more decades. But unlike nearby Korea, when it was all over, America did not succeed in upholding and protecting a divided country.

French incapacity in Indo-China, nor the American distance, did not pass unnoticed throughout other colonized countries. This consciousness was especially strong in Africa where France still held important, if loose, colonies in the north around Algeria and the middle of the continent. As one development of French weakness, closely allied to Britain’s weakening imperial energy, control slipped from London and Paris over Africa’s most important strategic maritime asset, the Suez Canal in Egypt. Nine years after Britain had exited India and two years after France surrendered at Dien Bien Phu this too fell from European control in the summer of 1956 (Decisive Day #54, 26/07/1956). The Suez Canal Company, in French the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, had been among the most aged and sacrosanct symbols of European imperial power.

While the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 had exposed social problems of segregation in America a more significant iniquity than public transport was segregated education. In the autumn of 1957, just as a new school year started, this revealed in the west of Alabama, in the state capital of Arkansas. American troops arrived in a Little Rock public school to make sure blacks and whites learnt together (Decisive Day #55, 25/09/1957). In so doing came another and possibly the most fundamental change in Civil Rights after voting changes – the uniform access of blacks and whites to public education.

Scientific advances also continued. While some had arisen from dubious Nazi experiments on extremes of pressure and temperature the war had nevertheless secured many advances. One example, though not only dependent on dubious wartime science, grabbed attention with the 1953 launch of a vaccination against polio. In the early 1950s there were over 50,000 polio cases in America. Not all of those were fatal – around 3,000 died – but that was still a striking mortality rate of 6% said the discoverer, Dr Salk – though the disease harmed relatively few in America looked at in overall global terms. There were 165 million Americans alive in the early 1950s. But the space race with the other superpower, USSR, on the other hand, marked a more significant milestone. War had inspired much talk and ambition stemming from advances in liquid oxygen fuel. Yet still, after a dozen plus years, no power had conquered the gravitational forces surrounding earth. Such confinement ended with the first machine to leave earth (Decisive Day #56, 04/10/1957). Sputnik’s record will forever stand as a first and with it the cusp moment in human connection with the wider solar system.

Another Soviet win in the 1950s appeared not in distant space but, conveniently for Moscow and less so for Washington, right on the southern doorstep of America. A succinct 150 kilometres from Florida the Caribbean island of Cuba had long caught America’s interest. Since at least the 1820s there had been American convictions that Cuba was, at a minimum, within Washington’s influence sphere. Besides, it was not impossible for the island to become a full American state like the island state of Hawaii to the west. Yet, in the final year of the 1950s appeared not a pro-American but a pro-Soviet regime (Decisive Day #57, 01/01/1959). The Castro regime was to cause a series of significant impacts in coming years – and starting with yet another military garrison, this time next door to America, and with tactical nuclear weaponry.