Above we have a well-worn On the Q.T. from November 1963, with Christine Keeler on the cover. Keeler, at upper right and below, was a London showgirl who had a brief relationship with Britain’s married Secretary of State for War, a man named John Profumo. The two met at a party in Buckinghamshire, in a mansion owned by Lord Astor, and though Keeler wasn’t a full-time prostitute, she occasionally made herself available to wealthy and powerful men and they sometimes gave her cash gifts.

She and Profumo were involved only a few weeks, but that was long enough for people to notice. When Profumo was paraded before the House of Commons and asked to answer to the rumors, he claimed there had been no impropriety between him and Keeler. It wasn’t just the lie that sank him—members of the government were alarmed because Keeler’s many acquaintances included Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian attaché at the Soviet embassy in London. With the Cold War in full swing, officials feared Keeler was working Profumo for nuclear secrets on behalf of Ivanov and the Russkies.

The mess cost Profumo his job and reputation, and also may have brought down conservative Prime Minster Harold Macmillan, who resigned six months later for “health reasons.” It was the scandal of the century in Britain, and really, it still is. Never since have sex, politics, and state secrets been fused in such a way. There are many detailed retellings of the story, but for people interested in an inside account, Keeler published an autobiography in 2001 that sparked an outcry because she wrote that actress Maureen Swanson was one ofthe girls who attended private orgies arranged by Dr. Stephen Ward (in sunglasses on the magazine cover). Ward was an osteopath who dabbled in pimping, and his orgies were infamous. Open only to the rich and powerful, they featured not only beautiful girls, but the occult, sadomasochism, interracial sex shows, and so forth. Maureen Swanson later became the Countess of Dudley through marriage to Lord Ednam, so Keeler’s naming of her as a participant caused quite a bit of embarrassment to British nobility, for which she sued and won a settlement.

We could go on, but life is short and history’s intrigues are many. For cinematic types, the 1989 film Scandal, starring Joanne Whalley and Bridget Fonda, is an entertaining way to learn more about the event. We watched it, and, while Whalley is fine in the lead role and Fonda is good as always, only reading Keeler’s own words can convey the sense of ’60s liberation and breeziness that was such a large part of her personality, and which the British public reacted to with such revulsion. More than one writer of the period observed that when Britain crucified Keeler, they were really trying to destroy a part of themselves. Keeler said it herself: “I took on the sins of everybody, of a generation, really.”

On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a stray dog into space. She had many names, but the international press picked up on Laika and that is how she has been known since. Her purpose was to provide crucial data about whether humans might be able to survive the conditions of launch and weightlessness. In that respect, her mission was a success, but she did not survive the flight, nor was she ever intended to, since the Soviets had not yet developed a way to retrieve orbiting capsules. Popular myth states that Laika starved to death after a few days floating in space, but that isn’t true—she actually died a few hours after launch due to stress (read: terror) and heat. The latter was due to a malfunction in the capsule, but it’s easy to imagine the former might have killed her anyway. But Laika lives on, sort of. In 2008, Russia unveiled a monument in her honor, built near the Moscow research facility that prepared her for spaceflight. It’s a statue of Laika standing on top of a rocket.     

Photo of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in the cabin of his Vostok I capsule, in which, on April 12, 1961, he circled the Earth in one hour and eighteen minutes and became the first human to reach space.     

Photo of the mushroom cloud generated by the Soviet nuclear weapon Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina, aka Stalin’s Jet Engine, aka Joe 4, detonated at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan today, fifty-six years ago.

One of the more interesting pulp events of the 1960s occurred when a little-known ballet dancer named Rudolph Nureyev broke away from two Russian guards at Le Bourget airport in Paris and dashed through a security station shouting in English, “I want to be free!” His sprint into Western arms made him internationally known, rocked the dance world, and strained relations between the Soviet Union and France. It was one of the first high-profile defections, and the inside story had all the pulp elements we love best—secret romance, political intrigue, lots of headlines, and a fascinating personality at the heart of it all.

For three weeks prior Nureyev had been performing in Paris with his troupe, the Leningrad Kirov Ballet, and in his off hours enjoying the City of Light with society friends. News of these associations had filtered back to Moscow and, concerned, Soviet authorities decided to summon Nureyev back to the motherland for a chat. For two weeks they had trying to get him sent home, but Kirov directors and the Soviet embassy in Paris had been deliberately unhelpful. Finally, on the day the Kirov was supposed to board a flight to London for the next leg of their tour, two Soviet security guards intercepted Nureyev and told him he was wanted in Moscow. His dash for freedom minutes later set off a chain of events that would end with him receiving asylum in France.

Most assumed Nureyev had been thinking of defection for quite a while, but Soviet records declassified in the late 90s suggest he planned to return home. There were rumors he had fallen in love with a beautiful Chilean heiress named Clara Saint—in fact, this story was reported in much of the Western press—but in reality Nureyev was gay and had been seriously involved with a male dancer from Leningrad named Taja Kremke. It was Kremke who convinced Nureyev his talent would never flourish in the Soviet Union, but still, left to continue his tour with the Kirov, Nureyev likely would have flown home at its completion. Despite his general unhappiness, it seems to be the actual arrival of the security guards that triggered his defection. When the guards appeared he immediately knew he was in deep trouble and feared returning to Moscow meant he would not be allowed to dance anymore.

News of the defection broke huge. The West gleefully used it deride the Soviets, who had been riding high on the triumph of sending the first human into space two months earlier. Soon the Clara Saint story began to be widely reported. But it soon became obvious neither politics nor love had been the primary trigger of the event, but a burning desire to dance and live unhindered. Nureyev got his wish—residing in the West he expanded his dance repertoire and acted in motion pictures. He also tookadvantage of his more permissive surroundings by pursuing relationships with famous men such as Tab Hunter, Eric Bruhn, and Anthony Perkins, and by posing for a very famous set of nude photos exposing his celebrated endowment. But he lost almost as much as he gained—he was completely cut off from his family back in Russia, and didn’t see his mother again until she was dying. Nureyev himself began to die from AIDS around 1990, and finally succumbed January 6, 1993. He was perhaps the greatest ballet dancer of the twentieth century, and the event that forever changed his life happened today in 1961.  

Tsar Bomba nuclear test, Novaya Zemlya Island, Mityushikha Bay, Arctic Circle, Soviet Union, 1961. These two images show the detonation and mushroom cloud of the most powerful weapon ever built. The bomb exploded 2.6 miles above Earth, yet its fireball reached the ground, its shockwave broke windows in Finland and Sweden, and its mushroom cloud reached seven times the height of Mount Everest.

Put together by co-directors Jayne Loader and Kevin Rafferty, the documentary Atomic Café consists entirely of 50s and 60s-era film clips—many of them U.S. Army-produced—compiled into a sometimes hilarious, but ultimately devastating indictment of the American government’s deliberate (and successful) attempt to control public opinion about the nuclear bomb. It features archival footage of everyone from Ronald Reagan to J. Edgar Hoover, all of them doing their part to manipulate the citizenry, and shows us government-produced public service films so filled with fallacies you marvel that people were capable of believing them. Our favorite moment comes when an obese man is shown falling in his shower to illustrate that daily life has plenty of risk, thus there’s no need to fear a nuclear bomb. And we also get a doofus turtle named Bert advising us to duck and cover in the event of an attack, which is pretty glib advice coming from a creature born with nature’s bomb shelter on its back. But the most revealing and poignant part of this film is seeing America’s elation at having an atomic bomb turn so quickly and so overwhelmingly to terror upon learning the Soviets had figured it out too. The Atomic Café opened in the U.S. today in 1982.

After a career spying for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Russian KGB agent-turned-billionaire Alexander Lebedev has finally figured out the West’s Achilles Heel—there’s nothing it won’t sell. At least, that’s what a lot of English observers said today, when it was announced that Lebedev was set to buy London’s venerable Evening Standard.

The Standard was launched way back in 1837, and as of 2006 was circulating more than 250,000 papers daily. But the rightwing imprint’s readership has been dropping steadily, and the resultant financial difficulties spurred a push to sell. It’s unclear as yet what Lebedev, who is the 358th richest man on the planet, will do to revive the Standard, but it’s also unclear whether he even cares. He told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “As far as I’m concerned this has nothing to do with making money. There are lots of other ways.”