On 15 September 1971 a small group of activists in Vancouver, Canada, the 'Don't Make a Wave Committee', set sail in an old halibut boat, the Phyllis Cormack, with a banner reading 'Greenpeace', to sail to the Alaskan island of Amchitka, where the United States planned an underground nuclear test. The boat was turned back by storms and the US Coast Guard, and the test went ahead on 6 November, but the publicity caused public outrage, and the US cancelled further tests there. The group became Greenpeace, which campaigned against whaling and nuclear testing, sailing its ships to the French test site at Mururoa.
Before and after
- 28 July 1971Birth of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
- from 14 August 1971 to 20 August 1971Stanford prison experiment
- 26 August 1971Launch of WorldCat
- 11 September 1971Death of Nikita Khrushchev
- 15 September 1971Greenpeace sails on its first voyage
- 18 September 1971Birth of Anna Netrebko
- 20 October 1971Birth of Snoop Dogg
- from 27 October 1971 to 16 May 1997Zaire
- 3 November 1971Invention of chmod
More in Society, economy & sport
- 1950Origins of Formula One
- 8 August 1967Founding of ASEAN
- 10 December 1987Rise of Hamas
- 1994Rise of Taliban
- 9 September 1999Founding of African Union
- 11 September 2001September 11 attacks
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.