1971

The 70s also brought about the age of the disco, as the race to space started heating up between the Americans and the Soviets.

It was a rude shock for President Milton Obote of Uganda while on an overseas trip, woke up to the news that Uganda was under a new regime on the morning of February 2, 1971. His head of the army and air force Major General Idi Amin had successfully overthrown the government and had declared himself president and chief of the military. During his reign, Idi Amin ordered that all Asians leave Uganda in the process plunging the country’s economy to new lows. He was also responsible for the massacre of over 300,000 Ugandans from the Lango and Acholi ethnic groups.

Under the guise of fighting for civil rights, Weather Underground a radical group with ties to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), advocated for the transformation of the American Society through violent means. The Weather Underground angered by the involvement of the USA in the Laos invasion carried out an attack on the Capitol building in Washington D.C. on March 1. There were no records of deaths from the explosion though the damaged stood at an estimated at $300,000.

The weathermen also targeted the New York Police Department headquarters, the Pentagon, State Department, and the Long Island Court House.

With the civil movements happening across the USA, the Soviets gained mileage and won the race to space. The Soviet launched three of their cosmonauts; Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsayev, and Georgi Dobrovolsky into space aboard the Soyuz 11 on June 30. Their mission was to dock and enter Salyut 1 a Soviet space station. The three perished on their reentry journey when they fired the explosive bolts in a procedure to separate the Soyuz 11 re-entry capsule from the rest of the craft and accidentally opening critical valves of the capsule. Exposed to the pressure-less environment of space the cosmonauts died within minutes, a hundred miles above the earth.

The world was still facing its darkest moments with the raging cold war and the highly competitive arms race; times were exciting as much as they were dangerous. There were lessons learned in that era and in particular, 1971 that will remain ebbed in history.