1953
- The Korean War ends after three years of inconclusive fighting. An armistice is signed and the boundary between North and South Korea is drawn at the 38th parallel.
- Nikita Khrushchev is appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party after Joseph Stalin dies. He will rule the Soviet Union through the most turbulent years of the Cold War. He was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev in October 1964.
- The Soviet Union detonates its first hydrogen bomb with much more power than the atomic bomb.
- Cambodia gains independence from France. Next door, the French fight to hold onto Vietnam.
- Heavy flooding in Holland kills 2,000 people.
- The Shah of Iran is returned to power in a coup that is supported by the U.S. and Great Britain. The former prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, had taken over western-owned oil companies and was becoming a Soviet ally.
- Cigarette smoking is reported to cause lung cancer for the first time.
- British physicist Francis Crick and American biologist James Watson publish their famous paper on the double-helix structure of DNA, the material in chromosomes that control heredity.
- Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain.