Our Earth's History
Snapshot · 1950

The world in AD 1950

By the Our Earth's History editorial team · Researched and written with AI assistance, checked against the sources below · How we make it

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TL;DR — In 1950 the Korean War began on June 25, the UN Security Council voted to resist the invasion, India became a republic, and Schuman proposed pooling European coal and steel.

The world of 1950 was five years out of a war and already sorted into two camps. The United States and the Soviet Union each had the atomic bomb, the People’s Republic of China was one year old, and the Marshall Plan was paying for the rebuilding of Western Europe. The arguments of the year ran through one building on the East River in New York, where the Security Council met on June 25 to condemn the North Korean attack on the South. India had put a republican constitution into force on January 26, Robert Schuman had proposed a common coal and steel authority on May 9, and South Africa’s parliament had passed the acts that sorted its people by race.

Africa

South Africa’s National Party government, elected in 1948, passed the laws that South African History Online lists as the base of apartheid: the Population Registration Act (No. 30 of 1950), which classed every South African as White, Black or Coloured, the Group Areas Act (No. 41 of 1950), and the Suppression of Communism Act (No. 44 of 1950); the first two commenced on July 7, 1950. On the Gold Coast, Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, founded in June 1949, opened a campaign of “positive action” early in 1950; the Library of Congress country study records that Nkrumah was jailed for sedition, and that in February 1951 his party won the first Legislative Assembly election under the new constitution while he was still in prison. In Libya, where a UN resolution of November 1949 required one state by January 1952, the National Constituent Assembly first met in November 1950 and offered the throne to Idris.

West Asia

Turkey held a general election in May 1950 in which, according to the Library of Congress country study, about 88 percent of an electorate of 8.5 million voted and gave the Democrat Party 408 seats against 69 for the Republican People’s Party; the same year Turkey sent an infantry brigade to Korea under UN command. In Iran, Encyclopaedia Iranica records that Mohammad Mosaddeq won reelection in January 1950 to the sixteenth session of parliament at the head of the National Front, which called for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Prime Minister Haj-Ali Razmara withdrew the Supplemental Agreement with the company from parliament in December 1950, and on March 15, 1951, on the recommendation of the oil committee that Mosaddeq chaired, parliament approved nationalization.

Europe

The European Union’s own history page dates NATO to April 4, 1949, the Council of Europe to May 5, 1949, and the plan of the French foreign minister Robert Schuman to put the coal and steel industries of Western Europe under a common authority to May 9, 1950; six countries, France and Germany among them, signed the coal and steel treaty on April 18, 1951. In London on July 5, 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee moved that the House of Commons support the government’s action “in helping to resist the unprovoked aggression against the Republic of Korea.”

East Asia

On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Attlee told the Commons that the Security Council met in emergency session the same day and, by nine votes to nil with Yugoslavia abstaining, called for a withdrawal to the 38th parallel; on June 27 a second resolution, carried seven votes to one, recommended that members furnish assistance to the Republic of Korea. President Harry Truman’s statement of June 27 ordered U.S. air and sea forces to cover the Korean government’s troops and sent the 7th Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. The People’s Republic of China, proclaimed on October 1, 1949, signed an alliance treaty with the Soviet Union in February 1950 and passed the Agrarian Reform Law on June 28; in October, the Library of Congress country study records, People’s Liberation Army units calling themselves the Chinese People’s Volunteers crossed the Yalu into North Korea, and at about the same time the army marched into Tibet.

South Asia

India’s constitution came into force on January 26, 1950,; B. R. Ambedkar chaired the drafting committee, and the document created a “sovereign democratic republic” that “shall be a Union of States.” Pakistan, under Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, had adopted the Objectives Resolution in March 1949 but no constitution. In Nepal the Nepali Congress Party, formed in March 1950, decided on armed struggle against the Rana regime; on November 6 King Tribhuvan escaped from his palace and sought asylum in the Indian embassy in Kathmandu, and five days later 300 members of the party’s Liberation Army opened armed attacks in the Tarai.

Central Asia

Kazakhstan, in the Library of Congress country study, a full union republic since 1936 with its capital at Alma-Ata, had received much of Russia’s relocated industry during the war and the Crimean Tatars, Germans and North Caucasus Muslims deported by Stalin; the Virgin Lands campaign that would put its grazing land under wheat began in 1953. The study dates no event to 1950 itself. In Afghanistan, Encyclopaedia Iranica records that Shah Mahmud, the king’s uncle, was prime minister from 1946 to 1953, that the years 1950 to 1952 were a short liberal interval, and that since the partition of India in 1947 Kabul had demanded a referendum on the status of the Pashtun regions east of the Durand Line.

The Americas

On April 7, 1950, the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under Paul Nitze completed NSC-68, a 58-page paper that argued for a massive buildup of U.S. conventional and nuclear arms; the Office of the Historian records that the paper was declassified only in 1975 and that U.S. military spending rose from 5 to 14.2 percent of gross domestic product between 1950 and 1953. Truman’s June 27 statement also strengthened U.S. forces in the Philippines and sent a military mission to the French in Indochina. In Brazil, Getulio Vargas ran for president in the 1950 election on a program of industrialization and social legislation and won 49 percent of the vote, taking office in 1951.

Oceania

Australia’s parliament passed the Communist Party Dissolution Act, listed in the Federal Register of Legislation as No. 16 of 1950 and dated October 20, 1950. In the Snowy Mountains, the hydroelectric scheme that Parliament had authorized on July 7, 1949, was in its first year of construction; the governor-general and Prime Minister Ben Chifley had fired the first blast at Adaminaby, New South Wales, on October 17, 1949. The Office of the Historian records that the outbreak of the Korean War led Australia and New Zealand to commit troops through the United Nations, and that in April 1951 Truman announced negotiations on a security treaty with both countries, which was concluded in the middle of that year. None of the sources opened for this page describes the Pacific island territories in 1950.

Sources

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APA
Our Earth's History. (2026, September 21). The world in AD 1950. Our Earth's History. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1950/
Chicago
Our Earth's History. “The world in AD 1950.” Our Earth's History, September 21, 2026. https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1950/.
MLA
“The world in AD 1950.” Our Earth's History, 21 Sep. 2026, https://ourearthshistory.com/world/ad-1950/.

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