1980
Solidarity strike at Gdansk
An electrician named Lech Walesa climbed over the fence of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk and joined a strike. Within weeks Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc, had ten million members. The communist authorities would impose martial law in 1981. Walesa would be president of a free Poland by 1990.
Iran-Iraq War begins
Saddam Hussein, calculating that revolutionary Iran was weak, sent his armies across the border into oil-rich Khuzestan. He badly miscalculated. The war ground on for eight years in trench lines, child soldiers, and poison gas. Perhaps a million died. At the end the border was more or less where it had been in September 1980.
Mount St. Helens erupts
After weeks of small quakes, the north face of a Washington State volcano gave way in the biggest landslide in recorded history and the mountain exploded sideways with the force of a hydrogen bomb. Fifty-seven people died. The blast wave flattened two hundred thirty square miles of old-growth forest like matchsticks.
Gwangju uprising
Students in the South Korean city of Gwangju rose against the military government of Chun Doo-hwan, who had seized power a few months earlier. Paratroopers responded with clubs and live ammunition. Over a week at least two hundred civilians died, perhaps many more. The massacre would eventually help birth South Korean democracy a decade later.
John Lennon shot
Outside the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West, a twenty-five-year-old fan who had stalked him for days shot John Lennon four times in the back as he came home from a recording session. He died in an ambulance. Millions held vigils around the world. The sixties, a friend said, had finally ended.
Four American nuns killed in El Salvador
Four American Catholic missionaries were pulled over on a rural road, raped, and murdered by members of El Salvador's national guard, which was trained and funded by the United States. The killings made international news and drew attention to the bloody civil war the US was backing. The investigation dragged for years. The death squads kept working. Liberation theology had its martyrs.
Rubik's Cube and Pac-Man launch
A small colored plastic puzzle invented by a Hungarian architecture professor and a yellow round-mouthed video game creature from a Namco studio in Japan together defined the early 1980s. Eight hundred million cubes sold in three years; Pac-Man became the first pop culture video game, spawning merchandise and a television show. Playful frustration became a global shared experience.