1960s

1960:

May: The National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam is established.

May 1st: The 1960 U-2 incident. A US Lockheed U-2 spy plane enters Soviet airspace. It is shot down and crashes near Sverdlovsk, near the Ural mountains.

June: The Congo Crisis begins.

The Boss unofficially becomes the first person in space through the Mercury Project.

September: Two NSA codebreakers, ADAM and EVA, defect to the Soviet Union.

1961:

January 20th: John Fitzgerald Kennedy becomes the 35th President of the United States.

February: America conducts the first tests with the Minutemen ICBMs.

April 12th: The Vostok 1 is launched into space, making Yuri Gagarin the first human to officially travel into space. The Russian scientist, Nikolai Stephanovich Sokolov, designed the multi-motor cluster for the Vostok Program.

Sokolov begins designing the Shagohod.

April 15th until April 19th: The Bay of Pigs Invasion. The Boss takes part in the invasion. The Pentagon starts to feel threatened as to their military authority being challenged by the CIA, the ones who backed the mission.

Cuban and American diplomatic relations end.

President Kennedy falls into disfavor with The Philosophers.

A group of university students create the FSLN in Nicaragua. Their aim is to overthrow the Somoza regime and establish a Marxist state.

May 5th: Alan Shepard becomes the first American astronaut, piloting the first sub-orbital flight.

August 13th: The construction of the Berlin Wall is started.

September 1st: The Eritrean War of Independence begins.

September 21st: The US Army 5th Special Forces Group is activated. Naked Snake and Solid Snake would later join the group.

October 30th: The Soviet Union test the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon in existence, over the Arctic.

1962:

January: SEAL team 1 is commissioned in the Pacific fleet and SEAL team 2 is commissioned in the Atlantic fleet.

February 20th: The Mercury Atlas 6 (Friendship 7) is launched, sending John Glenn into space. This is the first time an American orbits the Earth.

Major Zero helped Sokolov and his family defect from the Soviet Union to America.

October 14th until November 20th: A US Lockheed U-2 surveillence craft discovers Soviet missiles in Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The US government surrenders Sokolov over to the Soviet Union. After failing to build a Missile Base in Cuba, the Soviet Union looks somewhere else to build a Missile Base near the US.

December 14th: The Mariner 2 approaches Venus and starts scanning the planet, revealing it has cool clouds and an extremely hot surface.

The Boss has a covert mission at Tselinoyarsk, being ordered to kill The Sorrow, her former lover.

The United States begins production of the Davy Crockett nuclear missiles.

The SS-1C Scud-B missiles, designed by Aleksandr Leonovitch Granin, are deployed.

1963:

February: The United States and the Soviet Union sign the Hotline Agreement; a direct telephone connection is set up between the American and Soviet leaders.

April 1st: Ending a 114 day strike led by Bertram A. Powers against automated typesetting, The New York Times published a 702 page Sunday edition.

April 8th: The movie 007: From Russia With Love is released in the US.

June 16th: Valentina Tereshkova boards the Vostok 6 and becomes the first female cosmonaut.

July 4th: The movie The Great Escape is released.

August 5th: The United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in the Kremlin.

November 22nd: President Kennedy's assassination. Lyndon B. Johnson becomes the 36th President of the United States.

An American agent working within GRU, Oleg Penkovsky, is arrested and executed by the KGB.

1964:

January 11th: The US Department of Health announces that cigarettes can cause lung cancer.

February: The frequency of nuclear testing in Semipalatinsk has increased in order to test the Shagohod.

July 2nd: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act.

July: The Rhodesian Civil War begins. It was a war between the white minority ruled government of Rhodesia and the allied ZANU/ZAPU militant organizations.

August 2nd: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurs in Vietnam.

August 24th: Virtuous Mission. John is assigned the codename Naked Snake. Snake performs the world's first ever HALO (High Altitude-Low Opening) jump and infiltrates Tselinoyarsk to rescue Nikolai Stephanovich Sokolov. Snake and Ocelot meet for the first time. Sokolov divulges the existence of the Shagohod, a nuclear-equipped super-tank, to Snake. The Boss defects to the Soviet Union, kidnapping Sokolov and severely injuring Snake. Colonel Volgin fires a Davy Crockett into the OKB-754 research facility. Snake is extracted and placed in an Intensive Care Unit. The Virtuous Mission is a failure.

August 30th: Operation Snake Eater. Naked Snake infiltrates Tselinoyarsk once again to rescue Sokolov, destroy the Shagohod, eliminate the Cobra Unit, Colonel Volgin and The Boss, and retrieve the Philosophers' Legacy. He meets up with EVA who has infiltrated Volgin's ranks, and she offers to help him out.

September 2nd: Operation Snake Eater is declared a success. The Shagohod has been destroyed; the members of the Cobra Unit are dead. Colonel Volgin is killed by a bolt of lightning, and Naked Snake assassinates The Boss, recovering the Philosophers' Legacy. EVA, who was in fact an agent for the People's Republic of China, steals the microfilm and takes it back to China. It is later found to be a fake.

September: Naked Snake earns the title "Big Boss", but would leave FOX shortly thereafter.

The Philosophers' Legacy that EVA had stolen turns out to be a fake. The real Legacy was safely returned to the CIA, as revealed by Ocelot, who was ADAM, the real agent who had infiltrated Volgin's ranks all along.

The FARC begin an armed rebellion against the Colombian government with support from Cuba and the Soviet Union. During this time, the FARC hand over the San Hieronymo Peninsula to the Soviet Union in exchange for supplying the group with weapons. The Soviets establish an IRBM facility on the peninsula, and begin development of Metal Gear RAXA and a ballistic Metal Gear.

September 21st: The first test flight of the XB-70, a heavy bomber airplane which can fly at Mach 3 speeds.

September 25th: The Mozambican War of Independence begins. It was an armed conflict between the guerrilla forces of the Mozambique Liberation Front or FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) and Portugal.

October 12th: Three cosmonauts are sent into space aboard the Voskhod 1, becoming the first multi-man crew sent to space.

October 15th: Premier Khrushchev resigns from his position. Leonid Brezhnev becomes Party First Secretary.

October 16th: China successfully concludes its first tests of nuclear weaponry at the Lop Nur testing site.

1965:

January 30th: The US officially enters the Vietnam conflict.

March 2nd: The US starts bombing North Vietnam.

SIGINT joins ARPA. He takes part in the development of ARPAnet.

The beginnings of the Les Enfants Terribles project are commissioned by Lyndon B. Johnson.

November 1st: The First Chadian Civil War began.

The German MBT Leopard 1 were first deployed to replace the American-made MBT M47 and M48 Pattons.

1966:

The US government conducts a study on emergency medical treatment. The Department of Transportation lays the groundwork for the creation of the EMS system.

Big Boss encounters Frank Jaeger, a child soldier, during the Mozambican War of Independence. After rescuing him, he places him into a care facility, from where he is later taken by The Philosophers for their Perfect Soldier Project.

November: The Congo Crisis ends.

1967:

The Soviets start designing an enhanced version of the T-62 tank, the T-72 Ural tank.

The United States started deploying and launching the Saturn V. A Soviet Spy within NASA stole the blueprints of the Saturn V causing the Soviet Union to develop their own version of the Saturn V.

1968:

EVA disappears in Hanoi.

August 21st: The Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia.

The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is released.

1969:

January 20th: Richard Nixon begins his term of office as the 37th American President.

July 20th: The Apollo Program puts the first man on the moon.

November 17th: SALT-1 negotiations initiated: The talks' objective was to limit the US and Soviet Ballistic Missile Supply, provoking a détente era between the US and the Soviet Union. Thus, eliminating the need for the San Hieronymo Missile Base and it's construction plans were abandoned. However, the base was near completion, and many Russian soldiers were forced to remain stationed there.

December 5th: ARPAnet, the basis for the internet, goes online. It was established by the US Department of Defense and ARPA.