January
34th President Dwight D. Eisenhower
January 5 – Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot has its first public stage première in French as En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris.
January 6 – The Asian Socialist Conference opens in Rangoon, Burma.
January 7 – United States President Harry S. Truman announces the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb.
January 12 – Estonian émigrés found a government-in-exile in Oslo.
January 14
Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Yugoslavia.
The CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel first meets to discuss the UFO phenomenon.
January 15 – Georg Dertinger, foreign minister of East Germany, is arrested for spying.
January 19 – 71.1% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth.
January 20 – Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeds Harry S. Truman as the 34th President of the United States.
January 22 – The Crucible, a drama by Arthur Miller, opens on Broadway.
January 24
Mau Mau Uprising: Rebels in Kenya kill the Ruck family (father, mother and six-year-old son).
Walter Ulbricht announces that agriculture will be collectivized in East Germany.
January 28 – Derek Bentley is executed for murder at Wandsworth Prison in London.
January 31–February 1 – The North Sea flood of 1953 kills 1,836 people in the southwestern Netherlands (especially Zeeland), 307 in the United Kingdom[1][2] and several hundred at sea, including 133 on the ferry MV Princess Victoria in the Irish Sea.
February
February 1 – The surge of the North Sea flood continues from the previous day.
February 5 – Walt Disney's feature film Peter Pan premieres.
February 11
President Dwight D. Eisenhower refuses a clemency appeal for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
The Soviet Union breaks diplomatic relations with Israel after a bomb explosion at the Soviet embassy in reaction to the 'Doctors' plot'.
February 12 – The Nordic Council is inaugurated.
February 13 – Transsexual Christine Jorgensen returns to New York after successful sex reassignment surgery in Denmark.
February 16 – The Pakistan Academy of Sciences is established in Pakistan.
February 19 – Georgia approves the first literature censorship board in the United States.
February 25 – Release, in France, of Jacques Tati's film Les vacances de M. Hulot, introducing the gauche character of Monsieur Hulot.
February 28
James Watson and Francis Crick of the University of Cambridge announce their discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule.
Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia sign the Balkan Pact.
March
March 1
Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke after an all-night dinner with Soviet Union interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev. The stroke paralyzes the right side of his body and renders him unconscious until his death on March 5.[3]
Bernard Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg is made deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle.
March 6 – Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov succeeds Joseph Stalin as Premier and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
March 8 - The Thieves World, which had been transformed into the Russian mafia, are freed from prisons by the Malenkoy regime which ends the Bitch Wars.
March 13 – The United Nations Security Council nominates Dag Hammarskjöld as United Nations Secretary General.
March 14 – Nikita Khrushchev is selected First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
March 17 – The first nuclear test of Operation Upshot–Knothole is conducted in Nevada, with 1,620 spectators at 3.4 km (2.1 mi).
March 18 – An earthquake hits western Turkey, killing 250.
March 19 – The 25th Academy Awards ceremony is held (the first one broadcast on television).
March 25–26 – Lari Massacre in Kenya: Mau Mau rebels kill up to 150 Kikuyu natives.
March 26 – Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine.
March 29 - A fire at the Littlefield Nursing Home in Largo, Florida kills 33 persons, including singer-songwriter Arthur Fields.
April
April 7 – Dag Hammarskjöld is elected United Nations Secretary-General.
April 8 – Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to seven years in prison for the alleged organization of the Mau Mau Uprising.
April 10 – The Melbourne Knights is founded as Croatia SC in Melbourne.
April 13
Ian Fleming publishes his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale in the United Kingdom.
The German football team SG Dynamo Dresden is founded.
April 16
President Eisenhower delivers his "Chance for Peace" speech to the National Association of Newspaper Editors.[4]
A four-story building in Chicago belonging to the Habar Corporation catches fire, killing 35 employees.
April 17 – Mickey Mantle hits a 565 foot (172 m) home run at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. Mantle's home run is believed to be the longest home run in baseball history by many historians.
April 20 – Frank Sinatra and the arranger Nelson Riddle began their first recording sessions together at Capitol Records, which would result in some of the defining recordings of Sinatra's career.
April 25 – Francis Crick and James Watson publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", their description of the double helix structure of DNA.[5]
May
Mount Everest.
May 2 – Hussein is crowned King of Jordan.
May 5 – Aldous Huxley first tries the psychedelic hallucinogen mescaline, inspiring his book The Doors of Perception.
May 9 – France agrees to the provisional independence of Cambodia with King Norodom Sihanouk.
May 10 – The town of Chemnitz in East Germany becomes Karl Marx Stadt.
May 11 – The Waco tornado outbreak: A F5 tornado hits in the downtown section of Waco, Texas, killing 114.
May 15 – The Standards And Recommended Practices (SARPS) for Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) were adopted by the ICAO Council. These SARPS are in Annex 15 to the Chicago Convention and 15 May is celebrated by the AIS community as “World AIS Day”.
May 18 – At Rogers Dry Lake, Californian Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier (in a F-86 Sabrejet at an average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour).
May 25 – Nuclear testing: At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its only nuclear artillery test: Upshot-Knothole Grable.
May 29 – Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
June
June 1 – Uprising in Plzeň: Currency reform causes riots in Czechoslovakia.
June 2 – Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom at Westminster Abbey.
June 7 – Italian general election: the Christian Democracy party wins a plurality in both legislative houses.
June 8
Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence: A tornado kills 115 in Flint, Michigan (the last to claim more than 100 lives until the 2011 Joplin tornado).
Austria and the Soviet Union form diplomatic relations.
June 9
CIA Technical Services Staff head Sidney Gottlieb approves of the use of LSD in a MKULTRA subproject.
Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence: A tornado spawned from the same storm system as the Flint tornado hits in Worcester, Massachusetts, killing 94.
June 13 – Hungarian Prime Minister Mátyás Rákosi is replaced by Imre Nagy.
June 16 – The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia form diplomatic relations.
June 17 – Workers Uprising in East Germany: The Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.
June 18
Egypt declares itself a republic.
Tachikawa air disaster: A United States Air Force Douglas C-124 Globemaster II crashes just after takeoff from Tachikawa Airfield near Tokyo, Japan, killing all 129 people on board in the worst air crash in history at this time and the first with a confirmed death toll exceeding 100.
June 30
The first Chevrolet Corvette is built at Flint, Michigan.
First roll-on/roll-off ferry crossing of the English Channel, Dover–Boulogne.[6]
July
July 3 – First ascent of Nanga Parbat in the Pakistan Himalayas, the world's ninth highest mountain, is made by Austrian climber Hermann Buhl alone.
July 4 – Strikes and riots hit coal mining regions in Poland.
July 5 – The European Economic Community (EEC) holds its first assembly in Strasbourg, France.[dubious – discuss]
July 9 – The US Treasury formally renames the Bureau of Internal Revenue; the new name (which had previously been used informally) is the Internal Revenue Service.
July 10 – The Soviet official newspaper Pravda announces that Lavrentiy Beria has been deposed as head of the NKVD.
July 17 – The greatest recorded loss of United States midshipmen in a single event results from an aircraft crash near NAS Whiting Field.[7]
July 23 – Howard Hawks's musical film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, is released by 20th Century Fox.
July 26
Fidel Castro and his brother lead a disastrous assault on the Moncada Barracks, preliminary to the Cuban Revolution.
The Short Creek raid is carried out on a polygynous Mormon sect in Arizona.
July 27 – The Korean War ends with the Korean Armistice Agreement: United Nations Command (Korea) (United States), People's Republic of China, North Korea sign an armistice agreement at Panmunjom and the north remains communist while the south remains capitalist.
August
August 5 – Operation Big Switch: Prisoners of war are repatriated after the Korean War.
August 8 – Soviet prime minister Georgi Malenkov announces that the Soviet Union has a hydrogen bomb.
August 12 – A magnitude 7.2 earthquake totally devastates most of the Ionian Sea islands in Greece's worst natural disaster in centuries.
August 13 – Four million workers go on strike in France to protest against austerity measures.
August 17 – The first planning session of Narcotics Anonymous is held in Southern California (see October 5).
August 18 – The second Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, is published in the US.
August 19 – Cold War: The CIA helps to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, and retain Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the throne (see Operation Ajax).
August 20
The French government ousts King Mohammed V of Morocco and exiles him to Corsica.
The United States returns to West Germany 382 ships it had captured during World War II.
August 25 – The general strike ends in France.
September
September 4 – The discovery of REM sleep is first published by researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman.
September 5 – The United Nations rejects the Soviet Union's suggestion to accept China as a member.
September 7 – Nikita Khrushchev becomes head of the Soviet Central Committee.
September 12 - U.S. Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island.
September 25
A hurricane in South-East Asia kills over 1,000 people.[citation needed]
The first German prisoners of war return from the Soviet Union to West Germany.
September 26 – Rationing of cane sugar ends in the UK.
October
October – The UNIVAC 1103 is the first commercial computer to use random-access memory.
October 5
Earl Warren is appointed Chief Justice of the United States by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The first meeting of Narcotics Anonymous is held (the first planning session was held August 17).
October 6 – The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is made a permanent specialized agency of the United Nations.
October 9
Konrad Adenauer is re-elected as German chancellor.
The Guyanese constitution is suspended.
October 10
Roland (Monty) Burton wins the New Zealand air race in under 23 hours.
The Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of Korea is concluded in Washington D.C.
October 12 – The play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial opens at Plymouth Theatre, New York.
October 23 – The Philippines' DZAQ-TV3 (now ABS-CBN) makes its initial telecast, becoming Asia's first commercial television broadcaster.
October 30 – Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document of the United States National Security Council NSC 162/2, which states that the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat.
November
November 5 – David Ben-Gurion resigns as prime minister of Israel.
November 9 – The Laotian Civil War begins between the Kingdom of Laos and the Pathet Lao.
The Kingdom of Laos gains its independence from the French Army.
In Cambodia the Khmer Issarak begins to fight the French Army and the nation joins the First Indochina War but the Kingdom is established.
November 20 - The Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket, piloted by Scott Crossfield, becomes the first manned aircraft to reach Mach 2.
November 21
Puerto Williams is founded in Chile as the southernmost settlement of the world.
Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the skull of the Piltdown Man, one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, is a hoax.
November 25 – England loses 6–3 to Hungary at Wembley Stadium, their first ever loss to a continental team at home.
November 29 – French paratroopers take Điện Biên Phủ.
November 30 – Edward Mutesa II, the kabaka (king) of Buganda, is deposed and exiled to London by Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen, Governor of Uganda.
December
December – Hugh Hefner publishes the first issue of Playboy magazine in the United States, featuring a centerfold nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe; it sells 54,175 copies at $.50 each.
December 2 – The United Kingdom and Iran reform diplomatic relations.
December 6 – With the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Arturo Toscanini performs what he claims is his favorite Beethoven symphony, Eroica, for the last time. The live performance is broadcast nationwide on radio, and later released on records and CD.
December 7 – A visit to Iran by American Vice President Richard Nixon sparks several days of riots, as an reaction to the August 19 overthrow of the government of Mohammed Mossadegh by the US-backed Shah. Three students are shot dead by police in Tehran. This event becomes an annual commemoration.
December 8 – U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his Atoms for Peace address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
December 10 – Albert Schweitzer is given the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.
December 17 – The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approves color television (using the NTSC standard).
December 23 – The Soviet Union announces officially that Lavrentiy Beria has been executed.
December 24 – Tangiwai disaster: A railway bridge collapses at Tangiwai, New Zealand, sending a fully loaded passenger train into the Whangaehu River; 151 are killed.
December 25 – The Amami Islands are returned to Japan after 8 years of United States military occupation.
December 30 – The first color television sets go on sale for about US$1,175.
34th President Dwight D. Eisenhower
January 5 – Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot has its first public stage première in French as En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris.
January 6 – The Asian Socialist Conference opens in Rangoon, Burma.
January 7 – United States President Harry S. Truman announces the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb.
January 12 – Estonian émigrés found a government-in-exile in Oslo.
January 14
Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Yugoslavia.
The CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel first meets to discuss the UFO phenomenon.
January 15 – Georg Dertinger, foreign minister of East Germany, is arrested for spying.
January 19 – 71.1% of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth.
January 20 – Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeds Harry S. Truman as the 34th President of the United States.
January 22 – The Crucible, a drama by Arthur Miller, opens on Broadway.
January 24
Mau Mau Uprising: Rebels in Kenya kill the Ruck family (father, mother and six-year-old son).
Walter Ulbricht announces that agriculture will be collectivized in East Germany.
January 28 – Derek Bentley is executed for murder at Wandsworth Prison in London.
January 31–February 1 – The North Sea flood of 1953 kills 1,836 people in the southwestern Netherlands (especially Zeeland), 307 in the United Kingdom[1][2] and several hundred at sea, including 133 on the ferry MV Princess Victoria in the Irish Sea.
February
February 1 – The surge of the North Sea flood continues from the previous day.
February 5 – Walt Disney's feature film Peter Pan premieres.
February 11
President Dwight D. Eisenhower refuses a clemency appeal for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
The Soviet Union breaks diplomatic relations with Israel after a bomb explosion at the Soviet embassy in reaction to the 'Doctors' plot'.
February 12 – The Nordic Council is inaugurated.
February 13 – Transsexual Christine Jorgensen returns to New York after successful sex reassignment surgery in Denmark.
February 16 – The Pakistan Academy of Sciences is established in Pakistan.
February 19 – Georgia approves the first literature censorship board in the United States.
February 25 – Release, in France, of Jacques Tati's film Les vacances de M. Hulot, introducing the gauche character of Monsieur Hulot.
February 28
James Watson and Francis Crick of the University of Cambridge announce their discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule.
Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia sign the Balkan Pact.
March
March 1
Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke after an all-night dinner with Soviet Union interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev. The stroke paralyzes the right side of his body and renders him unconscious until his death on March 5.[3]
Bernard Freyberg, 1st Baron Freyberg is made deputy constable and lieutenant governor of Windsor Castle.
March 6 – Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov succeeds Joseph Stalin as Premier and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
March 8 - The Thieves World, which had been transformed into the Russian mafia, are freed from prisons by the Malenkoy regime which ends the Bitch Wars.
March 13 – The United Nations Security Council nominates Dag Hammarskjöld as United Nations Secretary General.
March 14 – Nikita Khrushchev is selected First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
March 17 – The first nuclear test of Operation Upshot–Knothole is conducted in Nevada, with 1,620 spectators at 3.4 km (2.1 mi).
March 18 – An earthquake hits western Turkey, killing 250.
March 19 – The 25th Academy Awards ceremony is held (the first one broadcast on television).
March 25–26 – Lari Massacre in Kenya: Mau Mau rebels kill up to 150 Kikuyu natives.
March 26 – Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine.
March 29 - A fire at the Littlefield Nursing Home in Largo, Florida kills 33 persons, including singer-songwriter Arthur Fields.
April
April 7 – Dag Hammarskjöld is elected United Nations Secretary-General.
April 8 – Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to seven years in prison for the alleged organization of the Mau Mau Uprising.
April 10 – The Melbourne Knights is founded as Croatia SC in Melbourne.
April 13
Ian Fleming publishes his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale in the United Kingdom.
The German football team SG Dynamo Dresden is founded.
April 16
President Eisenhower delivers his "Chance for Peace" speech to the National Association of Newspaper Editors.[4]
A four-story building in Chicago belonging to the Habar Corporation catches fire, killing 35 employees.
April 17 – Mickey Mantle hits a 565 foot (172 m) home run at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. Mantle's home run is believed to be the longest home run in baseball history by many historians.
April 20 – Frank Sinatra and the arranger Nelson Riddle began their first recording sessions together at Capitol Records, which would result in some of the defining recordings of Sinatra's career.
April 25 – Francis Crick and James Watson publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", their description of the double helix structure of DNA.[5]
May
Mount Everest.
May 2 – Hussein is crowned King of Jordan.
May 5 – Aldous Huxley first tries the psychedelic hallucinogen mescaline, inspiring his book The Doors of Perception.
May 9 – France agrees to the provisional independence of Cambodia with King Norodom Sihanouk.
May 10 – The town of Chemnitz in East Germany becomes Karl Marx Stadt.
May 11 – The Waco tornado outbreak: A F5 tornado hits in the downtown section of Waco, Texas, killing 114.
May 15 – The Standards And Recommended Practices (SARPS) for Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) were adopted by the ICAO Council. These SARPS are in Annex 15 to the Chicago Convention and 15 May is celebrated by the AIS community as “World AIS Day”.
May 18 – At Rogers Dry Lake, Californian Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier (in a F-86 Sabrejet at an average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour).
May 25 – Nuclear testing: At the Nevada Test Site, the United States conducts its only nuclear artillery test: Upshot-Knothole Grable.
May 29 – Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
June
June 1 – Uprising in Plzeň: Currency reform causes riots in Czechoslovakia.
June 2 – Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom at Westminster Abbey.
June 7 – Italian general election: the Christian Democracy party wins a plurality in both legislative houses.
June 8
Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence: A tornado kills 115 in Flint, Michigan (the last to claim more than 100 lives until the 2011 Joplin tornado).
Austria and the Soviet Union form diplomatic relations.
June 9
CIA Technical Services Staff head Sidney Gottlieb approves of the use of LSD in a MKULTRA subproject.
Flint–Worcester tornado outbreak sequence: A tornado spawned from the same storm system as the Flint tornado hits in Worcester, Massachusetts, killing 94.
June 13 – Hungarian Prime Minister Mátyás Rákosi is replaced by Imre Nagy.
June 16 – The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia form diplomatic relations.
June 17 – Workers Uprising in East Germany: The Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.
June 18
Egypt declares itself a republic.
Tachikawa air disaster: A United States Air Force Douglas C-124 Globemaster II crashes just after takeoff from Tachikawa Airfield near Tokyo, Japan, killing all 129 people on board in the worst air crash in history at this time and the first with a confirmed death toll exceeding 100.
June 30
The first Chevrolet Corvette is built at Flint, Michigan.
First roll-on/roll-off ferry crossing of the English Channel, Dover–Boulogne.[6]
July
July 3 – First ascent of Nanga Parbat in the Pakistan Himalayas, the world's ninth highest mountain, is made by Austrian climber Hermann Buhl alone.
July 4 – Strikes and riots hit coal mining regions in Poland.
July 5 – The European Economic Community (EEC) holds its first assembly in Strasbourg, France.[dubious – discuss]
July 9 – The US Treasury formally renames the Bureau of Internal Revenue; the new name (which had previously been used informally) is the Internal Revenue Service.
July 10 – The Soviet official newspaper Pravda announces that Lavrentiy Beria has been deposed as head of the NKVD.
July 17 – The greatest recorded loss of United States midshipmen in a single event results from an aircraft crash near NAS Whiting Field.[7]
July 23 – Howard Hawks's musical film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, is released by 20th Century Fox.
July 26
Fidel Castro and his brother lead a disastrous assault on the Moncada Barracks, preliminary to the Cuban Revolution.
The Short Creek raid is carried out on a polygynous Mormon sect in Arizona.
July 27 – The Korean War ends with the Korean Armistice Agreement: United Nations Command (Korea) (United States), People's Republic of China, North Korea sign an armistice agreement at Panmunjom and the north remains communist while the south remains capitalist.
August
August 5 – Operation Big Switch: Prisoners of war are repatriated after the Korean War.
August 8 – Soviet prime minister Georgi Malenkov announces that the Soviet Union has a hydrogen bomb.
August 12 – A magnitude 7.2 earthquake totally devastates most of the Ionian Sea islands in Greece's worst natural disaster in centuries.
August 13 – Four million workers go on strike in France to protest against austerity measures.
August 17 – The first planning session of Narcotics Anonymous is held in Southern California (see October 5).
August 18 – The second Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, is published in the US.
August 19 – Cold War: The CIA helps to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, and retain Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the throne (see Operation Ajax).
August 20
The French government ousts King Mohammed V of Morocco and exiles him to Corsica.
The United States returns to West Germany 382 ships it had captured during World War II.
August 25 – The general strike ends in France.
September
September 4 – The discovery of REM sleep is first published by researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman.
September 5 – The United Nations rejects the Soviet Union's suggestion to accept China as a member.
September 7 – Nikita Khrushchev becomes head of the Soviet Central Committee.
September 12 - U.S. Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island.
September 25
A hurricane in South-East Asia kills over 1,000 people.[citation needed]
The first German prisoners of war return from the Soviet Union to West Germany.
September 26 – Rationing of cane sugar ends in the UK.
October
October – The UNIVAC 1103 is the first commercial computer to use random-access memory.
October 5
Earl Warren is appointed Chief Justice of the United States by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The first meeting of Narcotics Anonymous is held (the first planning session was held August 17).
October 6 – The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is made a permanent specialized agency of the United Nations.
October 9
Konrad Adenauer is re-elected as German chancellor.
The Guyanese constitution is suspended.
October 10
Roland (Monty) Burton wins the New Zealand air race in under 23 hours.
The Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of Korea is concluded in Washington D.C.
October 12 – The play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial opens at Plymouth Theatre, New York.
October 23 – The Philippines' DZAQ-TV3 (now ABS-CBN) makes its initial telecast, becoming Asia's first commercial television broadcaster.
October 30 – Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document of the United States National Security Council NSC 162/2, which states that the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat.
November
November 5 – David Ben-Gurion resigns as prime minister of Israel.
November 9 – The Laotian Civil War begins between the Kingdom of Laos and the Pathet Lao.
The Kingdom of Laos gains its independence from the French Army.
In Cambodia the Khmer Issarak begins to fight the French Army and the nation joins the First Indochina War but the Kingdom is established.
November 20 - The Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket, piloted by Scott Crossfield, becomes the first manned aircraft to reach Mach 2.
November 21
Puerto Williams is founded in Chile as the southernmost settlement of the world.
Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the skull of the Piltdown Man, one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, is a hoax.
November 25 – England loses 6–3 to Hungary at Wembley Stadium, their first ever loss to a continental team at home.
November 29 – French paratroopers take Điện Biên Phủ.
November 30 – Edward Mutesa II, the kabaka (king) of Buganda, is deposed and exiled to London by Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen, Governor of Uganda.
December
December – Hugh Hefner publishes the first issue of Playboy magazine in the United States, featuring a centerfold nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe; it sells 54,175 copies at $.50 each.
December 2 – The United Kingdom and Iran reform diplomatic relations.
December 6 – With the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Arturo Toscanini performs what he claims is his favorite Beethoven symphony, Eroica, for the last time. The live performance is broadcast nationwide on radio, and later released on records and CD.
December 7 – A visit to Iran by American Vice President Richard Nixon sparks several days of riots, as an reaction to the August 19 overthrow of the government of Mohammed Mossadegh by the US-backed Shah. Three students are shot dead by police in Tehran. This event becomes an annual commemoration.
December 8 – U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his Atoms for Peace address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.
December 10 – Albert Schweitzer is given the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.
December 17 – The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approves color television (using the NTSC standard).
December 23 – The Soviet Union announces officially that Lavrentiy Beria has been executed.
December 24 – Tangiwai disaster: A railway bridge collapses at Tangiwai, New Zealand, sending a fully loaded passenger train into the Whangaehu River; 151 are killed.
December 25 – The Amami Islands are returned to Japan after 8 years of United States military occupation.
December 30 – The first color television sets go on sale for about US$1,175.