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The first of this series is the Korean War. Interestingly, my father was born while the Korean War was still going on. And if you pay attention to the podcast you can figure out how old my father is, more or less.
Find out how the Korean War set a precident for future wars but also how it affects North and South Korea to this day.
Get all this and more by listening to the CultureCast above (by pressing the little blue play botton), or by clicking through and checking out the transcript and further sources.
Korean War: A war never ended (CultureCast #032)
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Transcript
Yo CultureCats, Joshua Hwang here with another 90 Seconds to CultureCast.
Korean War: A war never ended
After the Second World War, tensions rose as a divided Korea attempted to re-unify itself. The small border battles ended when the North Korean Army invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. The Korean War had begun.
While this war started as a War between North and South Korea. The United States, on the side of South Korea, and China and the Soviet Union, on the side of North Korea, entered the war. As such, the Korean War is also thought of as a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union fighting for their capitalist and communist ideals, respectively.
The war shifted massively throughout, at one point the North Korean Army came so far south that it occupied almost 90% of the Korean Peninsula. Later the South Korean and US forces would go so far north they almost reached the Chinese border.
By 1953, neither side had a definite advantage and so a truce/armistice was signed. It formalized the border between North Korea and South Korea, and set up the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two countries: this is a buffer zone 4 km wide that military personnel or otherwise are not allowed to enter.
In starting the war, President Truman called his acts, “police action”, implying that he did not need support from Congress to go to war. Later this tactic would be used by President Lynden B. Johnson to go to war in Vietnam. Since a peace treaty was never signed between the warring nations, technically the North and South Korea are still at war.
Sources / Further Reading:
Wikipedia: Korean War
Wikipedia: Korean Demilitarized Zone
[tags]history, korean war, dmz, cold war, north korea, south korea, truman, culture, podcast[/tags]
(image from gin_e via flickr)
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