For more information on these conventions:

• Kingdom-Con: http://www.kingdom-con.com
• Anaheim Comic-Con: http://www.wizardworld.com/home-anaheim.html

I’m currently in the process of getting passes for the San Diego Comic-Con in late July, and will post on that when I have more information.

The Protectorate #1 is now available at IndyPlanet.com!

The Protectorate #1

By Jeffrey Harlan
24 pages, black & white

The Protectorate is a team of young heroes in a world where superhumans have existed for decades, but the superhero is almost unheard of.

The Protectorate is attacked during their public unveiling by Plasmid, the half-brother of one of the team members.

The Protectorate #1 TM and © Jeffrey Harlan, d.b.a. Bandwidth Comics. All rights reserved.

CBZ download 99 cents Coming soon	PDF download 99 cents Coming soon	Printed comic $4.00

Following a safety review of the Apollo program, on 31 January 1971, Apollo 14 marked humanity’s return to manned exploration of the Moon. Several months later, on 6 June 1971, three Soviet cosmonauts became the first crew from Earth to work in a space station. After 23 days on the station, they returned to Earth, but the cramped conditions of the Soyuz capsules prohibited them from wearing their space suits during the flight, and all three died when an air leak developed during re-entry. A month after the tragedy, Apollo 15 marked the fourth successful Moon landing on 26 July. Also in 1971, The Pentagon Papers, which revealed deeper American involvement in the Vietnam War than the executive branch had ever acknowledged, were leaked by former Defense Department aide Daniel Ellsberg and published in The New York Times; the draft was extended for two more years, and student deferments were eliminated; Texas Instruments developed the first pocket calculator; Intel introduced the first microprocessor, and the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age in the United States to eighteen. In an effort to slow down spiraling inflation, President Richard Nixon imposed a 90-day freeze on wages and prices and severed the dollar’s tie to gold, which meant that, from that point onward, the dollar would have no fixed value and would float on the world currency market.

On 16 April 1972, Apollo 16 landed on the Moon. That year, the Supreme Court declared capital punishment to be unconstitutional, and President Nixon traveled to China in what was widely considered to be the foreign relations coup of his presidency. In November, Nixon would be reelected, but a burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters by representatives of the Republican Party would ultimately mar his victory; the affair and its subsequent cover-up, known as the Watergate scandal, would eventually bring down his presidency and would color American politics for decades to come. As the year drew to a close, the final Moon landing of the Apollo program, Apollo 17, took place on 7 December.

American involvement in the Vietnam War ended in 1973, following the signing of peace accords on 27 January. The same day, President Nixon announced an end to the regular draft, though the draft instituted by the Superhuman Induction Act, which was separate from that created by the Selective Service Act, would remain in effect. The War Powers Resolution, passed by Congress over Nixon’s veto, limited presidential war-making power by establishing guidelines for military emergencies in the hope of preventing the continuation of another unpopular war like Vietnam had become. On 14 May, Skylab, an American space station, was launched, unmanned, into orbit; it would see three astronaut visits between 1973 and 1974 before falling into disuse due to budget cuts, and would eventually be allowed to burn up on reentry into the atmosphere in July 1979. In the wake of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, Arab leaders, frustrated by Israeli success and believing that success to be due largely to American aid, declared an embargo on shipments of oil to the United States, other Western nations, and Japan. The embargo would last until March 1974 and would cause soaring fuel prices and gas lines in the United States. Also in 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew, charged with tax evasion, resigned and was replaced by Gerald Ford, the first person to ever hold the office without being elected; the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women had the legal right to obtain abortions; Intel marketed the 8080 microprocessor, which became the central processing unit of several microcomputers; and, as the year drew to a close, the Watergate hearings began.

In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee instituted impeachment proceedings against President Nixon, but he resigned from the presidency—the first person to do so—before hearings could begin.Vice President Ford assumed the presidency, and one of his first acts was to pardon Nixon. Also that year, Congress established guidelines for research conducted on humans with the passage of the National Research Act.

President Ford halted compulsory draft registration in 1975 and also ended the superhuman draft under the Superhuman Induction Act, though the most powerful superhumans would continue to be drafted, and superhuman registration was still required. The first prison specifically designed to hold superhuman criminals opened in a remote area of the Arizona desert in early 1975, and North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, in April 1975, bringing an end to the Vietnam War. Also in 1975, in the final Apollo mission, the first U.S.-Soviet space link occurred 140 miles above Earth when an Apollo capsule docked with a Soyuz capsule.

President Jimmy Carter, who had been elected in November 1976, issued a blanket pardon to draft evaders shortly after his inauguration in January 1977, allowing them to return to the United States without fear of arrest. The Supreme Court in 1977 reversed itself, now ruling that the death penalty was legal. On 12 August 1977, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration unveiled the prototype Space Shuttle. Though NASA officials wanted to name the prototype Constitution, President Ford had ordered that it be named Enterprise after receiving 100 thousand letters from fans of the television series Star Trek, begging him to name the first reusable spacecraft after the ship featured in the show. The prototype shuttle had no engines and was used for test gliding flights and a publicity tour before being sent first to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and then to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it would sit in the open and unmaintained for decades before a planned museum complex is built around it.

America and Iran would come to be at odds in 1979, when religious conservatives ousted the shah, a longtime friend of the United States. In the aftermath of the revolution, Iranian islamic militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and would hold 52 embassy hostage for 444 days; the humiliation of the hostage crisis would contribute to Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election.

In his farewell address before Kennedy took office in January 1961, outgoing President Eisenhower, who had developed reservations about the arms buildup he had presided over, warned against the overwhelming power of the military-industrial complex. The newly-elected President Kennedy would quickly create the Alliance for Progress, an aid program for the economic development of Latin American nations, but his good intentions were soon undermined by the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in which 1,500 CIA-trained and -armed Cuban expatriates were sent to the island nation. On 12 April, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, completing one orbit of Earth. That was soon followed by the United States’ space program, which sent Astronaut Alan Shephard on a 15 minute 22 second suborbital flight on 5 May. Less than three weeks later, on 25 May, President Kennedy, in a speech on “Urgent National Needs” to a joint session of Congress, pledged to send astronauts to the Moon by the end of the decade. August saw the closing of the border between East and West Berlin by the Soviet Union and the literal overnight construction of the Berlin Wall, which surrounded West Berlin in an attempt to halt the exodus from East Germany. September saw the death of Nucleus, the first superhero, who was led into a trap by a New York mob boss whose operations had been hampered by the hero. Nucleus was bound and shot execution-style, and his body dumped into the bay. He was survived by his wife and three children, including a newborn daughter who would never know him growing up. Also in 1961, scientist Marshall Nirenberg read one of the “letters” of the genetic code for the first time, physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others developed a method of classifying subatomic particles, and the 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing voting rights in presidential elections for residents of the District of Columbia, was ratified.

On 20 February 1962, Astronaut John Glenn, Jr., became the first American to orbit the Earth. During his flight, Glenn observed luminous yellow-green particles drifting past his window during the flight, noting that it were “as if I were walking through a field of fireflies.” The particles remained a mystery until Astronaut Scott Carpenter, during his orbital flight on 24 May, determined that the particles were actually frost flaking off the outside of the capsule. The granola bar, originally called “bone-bones,” was invented by Nestle for use by astronauts as a food source during their missions. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962 when the Soviet Union began secretly building missile-launching sites in Cuba, bringing the world to the brink of war over the course of the two-week event. President Kennedy demanded the removal of the missiles and imposed a naval blockade of the island, and at the last moment, the Soviet freighters turned back from delivering supplies. Khrushchev promised to remove the missiles, and in exchange, the United States offered to remove obsolete missiles from positions in Turkey. In the wake of the crisis, Congress quickly and overwhelmingly passed the Superhuman Induction Act, which established provisions for the drafting of superhumans into the military, separate from the regular draft established by the Selective Service Act, which in effect created a military superhuman operations command not unlike the Soviets’ Red Legion. On the other side of the world, U.S. troops assigned to a military assistance command in Vietnam were instructed to fire back if fired upon.

In 1963, the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed a Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which barred all above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who had held onto power for a decade and refused to hold elections for fear of a communist takeover, was overthrown. The United Nations established a commission in 1963 to study superhumans and related issues in the wake of the United States’ and Soviet Union’s growing militarization of superhumans. In the United States, the first liver transplant was performed by surgeon Thomas Starzl, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd of 250,000 during the March on Washington, and on 22 November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Following the assassination, Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as Kennedy’s successor, and the Warren Commission, charged with investigating the assassination, found that there was no conspiracy and that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin; the report was greeted skeptically by many.

The United States became directly involved in the Vietnam War in 1964 following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. President Johnson asked Congress “to join [him] in affirming … that the United States will continue its basic policy of assisting the free nations of the area to defend their freedom.” Congress responded with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided the legal basis for the escalation of the war. That year, Congress also passed the Civil Rights Act and ratified the 24th Amendment, which prohibited poll taxes. In November, President Johnson was elected to a full term as president, but he would decline to run for a second term in 1968.

In February 1965, the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese communist rebels, attacked the U.S. military compound at Pleiku and killed eight Americans. President Johnson responded with Operation Rolling Thunder – air raids in North Vietnam. By the end of 1965, 184 thousand troops were in Vietnam. Draft quotas rose automatically during the escalation of the war, quadrupling over the course of two years. Draftees made up 16% of the army in 1965, but constituted 88% of the troops in Vietnam. Despite the escalation, President Johnson still declined to involve superhuman troops in the war, believing that doing so would only provoke the Soviets, who were supporting the North Vietnamese, to send in the Red Legion in response, possibly even escalating to the point of a nuclear exchange. Back in the United States, the Watts Riots left 34 dead and $200 million in property damage. The Voting Rights Act, a major piece of civil rights legislation, made the federal government responsible for ensuring that all citizens were able to vote, and President Johnson introduced his “Great Society,” which was intended to improve the quality of life of all Americans; it included such programs as Medicare, which paid the healthcare expenses of senior citizens, the Water Quality Act, the Higher Education Act, and also involved the creation of the Department of Housing an Urban Development. Also in 1965, China began to undergo the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” though it would be some time before China would halt the executions of anyone discovered to have superhuman powers, which were believed to be impure and an abomination. The Second Vatican Council, also held in 1965, would introduce a number of major reforms to the Catholic Church, including a shift from holding masses in Latin to holding them in the native language of the area where each church was located and a reassessment of whether non-Catholics could, in fact, enter Heaven.

By 1966, the United States had 385 thousand soldiers in Vietnam, and the bombing of North Vietnamese targets continued; Hanoi and Haiphong were heavily bombed, and the U.S. also began to bomb communist strongholds in Cambodia. Meanwhile, heart surgeon Michael De Bakey implanted the first artificial heart in a human, and the Department of Transportation was created.

The American space program suffered a severe blow on 27 January 1967 when astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed by a fire that broke out inside the Apollo 1 capsule during a simulated countdown at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The investigations stemming from the fire would delay the manned space program for nearly two years. President Johnson restricted, but did not halt, the bombing of North Vietnam so that peace talks could take place, but escalated the bombing once again when the talks broke down. He again prohibited the use of superhuman soldiers in Southeast Asia. Riots and protests began to erupt in the United States over the war in Vietnam. The Reverent Martin Luther King, Jr., a critic of the war, described the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In response to the escalation of antiwar criticism, the CIA launched Operation Chaos: a massive effort to catalog antiwar protesters and interfere with their activities. More than a thousand organizations and 200 thousand individuals were logged in files, and CIA informants penetrated most antiwar groups. 1967 also saw the “long, hot summer” of the Detroit riots; the ratification of the 25th Amendment, which provided for presidential disability; the first heart transplant; and the signing of a treaty by the United States, Soviet Union, and 57 other nations which banned the use of nuclear weapons in space and established principles for the peaceful exploration of space.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated outside his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968, while the war in Vietnam reached a turning point with a massive North Vietnamese assault, known as the Tet Offensive. In three weeks of intense fighting, the United States held its own militarily, but sustained severe public relations losses at home, with American public opinion making it difficult to conduct the war. With 536 thousand troops in Vietnam, U.S. manpower reached its highest level. In what would become another blow to the public’s opinion of the military, the My Lai massacre saw U.S. troops, on a search-and-destroy mission, kill nearly 500 South Vietnamese civilians – men, women, and children – in a single village. The troops involved would later be charged with war crimes and tried for murder, with one conviction, but the damage had been done. To fund the Vietnam War, President Johnson requested a 10% personal income tax, which no doubt added to its existing unpopularity. Senator Robert Kennedy, presidential candidate and brother of President John Kennedy, was assassinated hours after a California primary victory, and even after protesters disrupted the televised Democratic National Convention, revealing the deep divisions within the party, Richard Nixon, a Republican, would have a difficult time winning the election in November. Also in 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed by 115 nations, including the United States; the nuclear-capable nations agreed not to transfer nuclear power, while non-nuclear signers agreed not to build or develop nuclear weapons. Eventually, 140 nations would sign the treaty. The year concluded on a high note, however, as on 21 December, Astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders orbited the Moon in Apollo 8. On Christmas Eve, during a telecast to Earth from 250 thousand miles away, the astronauts read from the Bible’s Book of Genesis.

On 20 July 1969, the world watched in awe as Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, and Astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on another world. Many conspiracy theories would eventually surround the event, ranging from the belief that the event was staged to the assertion that the astronauts saw alien spacecraft surrounding them at the landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. A few weeks later, a concert was held in Woodstock, New York, which would become the stuff of legend, and when peace talks failed once again, President Richard Nixon ordered the bombing of communist strongholds in Cambodia. The Nixon Doctrine signaled a new direction in American foreign policy when President Nixon stated that the United States would consider its vital interests first, rather than trying to solve the problems of other nations. On 14 November, Apollo 12 landed on the Moon, continuing the success of Kennedy’s dream.

By 1952, the war continued to rage in Korea. CBS relied on a UNIVAC computer to predict the results of the presidential election; it correctly predicted a landslide victory by former General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, one of the heroes of World War II. As the United States developed the first hydrogen bomb and elected Eisenhower, the first superhumans began to appear. Many of them were American soldiers serving in Korea, and they were pulled from their units in an effort to develop them into a special operations force, called Team Liberty by the press. Unfortunately, by the time they were ready for deployment, an armistice was signed, bringing an end to hostilities on 27 July 1953.

The truce was unsatisfactory to everyone involved; no borders changed, and the peninsula remained divided roughly along the 38th Parallel. Within six months, Team Liberty was disbanded as its members returned to their pre-military lives. Also in 1953, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin died and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, and the Soviet Union followed the United States in developing a hydrogen bomb of its own. The first IBM computer, the IBM 701, was introduced in 1953, and the first high-speed printer was linked to a computer. American researcher James Watson and his English partner, Francis Crick, identified the basic double helix structure of DNA and its self-replicating process; the discovery began a new era in the study of genetics and shed new light on the emerging superhuman population. In response to the appearance of superhumans, the American, British, and Soviet governments independently established programs to study the phenomenon among their populations and to assess any potential threats to their national security that may have resulted .

In 1954, Vietnam was divided by the Geneva Agreements when the French were forced out, dividing the former colony into the countries of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam, like North Korea, was backed by the Soviet Union, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States. Meanwhile, the first superheroes began appearing, starting in New York City with Alexander Stevens, who had served in Korea and was part of the original Team Liberty. Stevens operated as the costumed crimefighter Nucleus, and was soon joined by fellow New Yorker and former Team Liberty teammate Jeff Simonson, who took the name Strongman. The Soviet Union again rejected German unification, heightening Cold War tensions, and Congress censured Senator McCarthy for his behavior during hearings conducted by his Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations. In the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court unanimously overruled the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and declared that segregated public schools violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, stating: “We conclude that in the field of education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Also that year, Microbiologist Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine began testing in mass trials, and the first successful kidney transplant was performed by a Harvard University surgical team. The U.S.S. Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, was launched at Groton, Connecticut, and by order of President Eisenhower, the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Also in 1954, a Mars “expedition” took 20 thousand photographs of the Red Planet via telescope, apparently confirming the claims of Percival Lowell in 1915 that “Mars is inhabited, and we have absolute proof.” Lowell, who dubbed lines seen crossing Mars “canali,” or channels—which was frequently misinterpreted as canals—believed them to be proof of extraterrestrial life. The new photographs seemed to support the belief that the canali were of artificial origin, as they followed great-circle courses and one was even observed to be perfectly straight for 1500 miles. Also photographed was a cloud-like formation 1100 miles across in a shape resembling the letter M, which remained in a fixed position for more than a month. At the intersecting points of the shape were three intense bright “knobs;” the cause of the phenomenon was never adequately explained.

In 1955, Salk’s polio vaccine was pronounced safe, and distributed in a mass immunization program that would eventually wipe out the disease and the fear that accompanied it. Physicists Owen Chamberlain and Emilio Segre discovered the antiproton, a subatomic particle of antimatter identical to the proton but with a negative, rather than positive, charge, while physicists Clyde Cowen, Jr., and Frederick Reines discovered the neutrino, a subatomic particle with no mass or charge. That year, IBM introduced its first business computer, the IBM 752, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., led the Montgomery bus boycott, the first battle of the modern civil rights struggle.

The election of 1956 saw President Eisenhower reelected to his second term. Bolstered by the successful test of the hydrogen bomb and a growing population of superhumans, and equally worried about the U.S.S.R.’s subsequent successful test and its own burgeoning superhuman population, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles employed an aggressively anti-Communist foreign policy. Also in 1956, an IBM team led by John Backus invented FORTRAN, the first computer programming language.

In 1957, the United Kingdom joined the United States and the Soviet Union in the exclusive nuclear club when it detonated a hydrogen bomb of its own. Electricity was produced by a nuclear reactor on an experimental basis in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957. On 4 October of that year, the Soviets placed the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit, and then on 3 November launched Sputnik 2, carrying a dog, Laika (“Barker” in Russian), connected to a life support system. The dog captured hearts around the planet as its life slipped away after a few days in orbit. Sputnik 2 would burn up in the atmosphere on 14 April 1958, five months later.

Three months after the launch of Sputnik 1, on 31 January 1958, the United States followed suit by launching the Explorer 1 into orbit as well. The Space Race had begun. On 29 July, the National Aeronautics and Space Act created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was established on 1 October that year to conduct research and space exploration, despite oppostion from the Department of Defense, which sought to keep space research a military matter. During the opposition of Mars in 1958, Dr. William Sinton performed infrared scans of the planet, and discovered that the sun’s energy was being absorbed in certain wavelengths over dark areas near the planet’s equator, but not over the lighter desert regions. These wavelengths were the same as those absorbed by hydrocarbon compounds in terrestrial vegetation. Combined with the 1926 discovery that these areas, including Mare Serpentis, Mare Sirenium and Syrtis Major, changed from brown to dark green and back again as Mars’ seasons progressed, this led to increased speculation about the possibility of life on Mars, speculation no doubt aided by the growing number of science fiction films featuring alien invaders produced by Hollywood during the 1950s.

On 2 January 1959, the U.S.S.R. succeeded in sending an unmanned probe, Luna 1, to the moon after multiple failures by both the Soviets and the Americans. Luna 1 flew within 3,500 miles of the Moon, then went into orbit of the Sun. On 27 April that year, NASA selected its first class of astronauts, known as the Mercury Seven: Malcolm Scott Carpenter, Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, Jr., John Herschel Glenn, Jr., Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom, Walter Marty “Wally” Schirra, Jr., Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr., and Donald Kent “Deke” Slayton. The astronauts and their wives became media stars after they signed a deal giving Life Magazine the rights to their stories. Cuba, Fidel Castro staged a successful coup against the government of Fulgencio Batista. The new Castro regime accepted aid from the U.S.S.R. and Castro announced that he would export his revolution throughout Central America. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce independently invented the microchip in 1959, paving the way for miniature products and electronics.

By March 1941, the United States instituted the Lend-Lease Act, which was designed to aid any country whose continued existence was deemed to be in the vital interest of the United States. While officially neutral, this effectively lent American support to the Allies in their fight against the Axis. On 7 December, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, destroying much of the United States’ Pacific Fleet. Casualties totaled 2,280 killed, including sixty-eight civilians, and 1,109 wounded. Simultaneously, the Japanese forces attacked the Philippines, Guam, Midway, Hong Kong, and the Malay Peninsula. The next day, the United States Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and on 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

The war continued to rage until 1945. On 12 April of that year, President Roosevelt, in the first year of an unprecedented fourth term, died and was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman. On 7 May, after weeks under siege in Berlin, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies following the suicide of Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, ending the war in Europe. In July, the Allies met at Potsdam to hammer out details of the new peace. In early August, the United States dropped leaflets over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, warning that it would obliterate the city if Japan didn’t surrender immediately. The Japanese refused, and days later, on 6 August, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, followed by another on Nagasaki three days later. One hundred thousand people died immediately, and another 100 thousand would die in the months that followed. On 14 August, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. The Soviet Union and the United States began to occupy the Korean peninsula, which had been a Japanese colony, dividing it in half at the 38th Parallel; the Soviets formed and controlled North Korea, while the Americans did the same for South Korea. Meanwhile, back in the United States, the House Committee on Un-American Activites began investigating Socialists, Communists, and other individuals and organizations that it deemed “un-American,” and its own activities would soon lead to the Red Scare.

Soon after the war ended, 1946 saw the birth of the first electronic comptuer, ENIAC, which was developed by John Eckert and John Mauchly. In 1947, the National Security Act split the United States Army Air Corps into a new branch, the U.S. Air Force, and coordinated it with the Army and Navy in the Department of Defense, which replaced the Department of War. The NSA also created the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. The draft, which had been instituted in 1940, ended, and the Presidential Succession Act established that the Speaker of the House of Representatives as next in line for the presidency following the vice president, followed in turn by the president pro tempore of the Senate and then the cabinet members in order of the date on which each of their departments were established. Also that year, Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager made the first supersonic flight aboard the Glamorous Glennis, a U.S. Bell X-1 rocket plane, and on 4 July, a flying saucer reportedly crashed near Roswell New Mexico, but the Army Air Corps representatives there quickly changed their story, claiming instead that it was actually an experimental weather balloon.

The Selective Service Act of 1948 saw the reinstatement of the draft, requiring the registration of all men between the ages of 18 and 26, and would continue throughout the Cold War and beyond. The Cold War would intensify in late 1948 when the Soviet Union–opposing the unification of occupied Germany, which had been split into various sectors by the Allies following Germany’s defeat three years earlier–began a blockade that cut off West Berlin, controlled by the Americans, French, and British and located deep within Soviet-controlled East Germany, from the rest of West Germany. The U.S. and U.K. responded an airlift of food and supplies that lasted slightly less than a year; each day, up to eight thousand tons of supplies would be flown into the city. President Truman, a Democrat, was reelected to the presidency of the United States, narrowly defeating his Republican opponent, Dewey, despite predictions by the press of a Republican victory.

As the decade drew to a close in 1949, the nations of Western Europe and the United States created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide a unified defense system in the face of growing Soviet power in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, Mauchly and Eckert, who had created the ENIAC computer a few years earlier, followed up on their success by creating BINAC, the first American electronic-stored program computer.