Today in the Sobel Timeline: July 20

On July 20, 1899, the Rules Committee of the North American Grand Council formed the Special Subcommittee of the Rules Committee to Investigate Charges of Treason, also known as the Nelson Subcommittee after its chairman, Councilman Henderson Nelson of the Northern Confederation. The Nelson Subcommittee was formed to investigate charges made ten days earlier by Councilman Fritz Stark that Governor-General Ezra Gallivan was in the pay of the Mexican corporation Kramer Associates. Ordinarily, the subcommittee would have been chaired by a member of the majority People's Coalition, but Gallivan requested that a member of the opposition Liberal Party be appointed "to remove any doubts as to its impartiality." Sobel states that Gallivan also requested a Liberal committee chairman because the Rules Committee's Coalitionists were all supporters of his rival Thomas Kronmiller.

 On July 20, 1962, Kramer Associates President Carl Salazar gave the first and only press conference of his presidency at K.A. headquarters in Taiwan. Salazar announced the successful test of the world's first atomic bomb, which had been developed by K.A., in the north Pacific three weeks earlier. "We shall never use this device in the cause of aggrandizement," he said. "But we will not hesitate to destroy any nation that has the foolishness to re-open the Global War." Salazar also said that the Kramer Bomb was "not a weapon of war, but one of peace."