Many consider the beginning of the Korean War to be on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel. However, the stage was set after Japan's surrender when the peninsula was divided between the two zones of occupation -- the Soviet Union to the north and the United States to the south. As tension between the two superpowers grew, eventually two independent governments formed. These countries are known as the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) and have remained divided to this day. Show
Impact:  For more information please visit: https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/korea-70-years-on/ Image Credit Graphic by Celine Mahne, Data from Brittannica While the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States has run its course, the Korean Peninsula remains a battleground not only between the two Koreas but between two superpowers. Although the Soviet Union has fallen, China has replaced them as North Korea's biggest ally. With communist North Korea backed by the PRC and capitalist South Korea backed by the United States, the battle between these two ideas that encompassed the Cold War remains a reality. So what does the future hold for the Korean Peninsula? Sixty years ago North and South Korea ended the "Korean Conflict" by agreeing to the Armistice Agreement for the Restoration of the South Korean State. The agreement—a cease-fire, not a peace treaty—called for the Korean peninsula to be divided by a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) and a buffer, the demilitarized zone (DMZ), whose function would be to "prevent the occurrence of incidents which might lead to a resumption of hostilities."The armistice line meanders in an east-west fashion across Korea, connecting what Koreans call the East Sea with Gyeonggi Bay, 148 miles (238 kilometers) away off the peninsula's west coast. Although it approximates the positions held by communist and U.S.-led U.N. forces for most of the last two-thirds of the war, the MDL is not the same line that had divided Korea before North invaded South in June, 1950. That line was the 38th parallel, whose origins as modern Korea's first intra-national boundary can be traced back to the final hours of World War II, when officials from the U.S. War and State Departments were preparing to negotiate with the Soviet Union over how Japanese-occupied Korea would be administered following Japan's surrender. Future U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, then a colonel on General George Marshall's staff, and fellow Army staffer Col. Charles "Tic" Bonesteel were assigned with identifying a line of control that both the U.S. and the Soviets could agree to. Time was of the essence: the Soviets had just entered the war against Japan, and American officials worried that they would rush in to occupy the entire Korean peninsula before the U.S., whose nearest troops were still 600 miles (966 kilometers) away on Okinawa, could establish its own presence on the mainland. Rusk knew that the 38th parallel "made no sense economically or geographically"—Korea, in fact, had enjoyed unity and a high degree of geographic continuity for the better part of a millennium—but this was now the Cold War. "Military expediency" had to rule the day. Korea, it was thought, would be divided only temporarily. Rusk later recalled the experience in his 1991 memoir, As I Saw It: During a meeting on August 14, 1945, the same day as the Japanese surrender, [Bonesteel] and I retired to an adjacent room late at night and studied intently a map of the Korean peninsula. Working in haste and under great pressure, we had a formidable task: to pick a zone for the American occupation. Neither Tic nor I was a Korea expert, but it seemed to us that Seoul, the capital, should be in the American sector. We also knew that the U.S. Army opposed an extensive area of occupation. Using a National Geographic map, we looked just north of Seoul for a convenient dividing line but could not find a natural geographical line. We saw instead the thirty-eighth parallel and decided to recommend that ... [Our commanders] accepted it without too much haggling, and surprisingly, so did the Soviets. Thus was the Korean peninsula first divided. Early attempts to merge the two occupation zones back into a single, united Korea failed. And by late summer of 1948 the independent and increasingly antagonistic states of North and South Korea had been established. Within two years, the two new nations would be in a war that eventually left 2.5 million Koreans dead, injured, or reported missing. And, 60 years later, still divided. What happened to the 38th parallel after the Korean War?Eventually, an armistice signed in July 1953 brought the Korean War to an end. In total, about five million people died in the Korean War, including many civilians. The cease-fire line roughly followed the 38th parallel with only minor changes, and the country remains divided along that line still today.
What is significant about the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula?The 38th parallel of latitude was chosen in 1945 by the USA and USSR as a convenient borderline for their divided military occupation of the Korean peninsula. Under this divided occupation, Korea rapidly developed two ideologically different regimes, a socialist state in the North and a liberal state in the South.
What happened to divide the country of Korean in half at the 38th parallel?The Korean and Cold Wars
The conflict lasted from June 1950 to July 1953 and killed more than 3 million Koreans and U.N., and Chinese forces. A truce was signed at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, and in it the two countries ended up back where they started, divided along the 38th parallel.
How did Korea become divided at the 38th parallel?In the last days of the war, the U.S. proposed dividing the Korean peninsula into two occupation zones (a U.S. and Soviet one) with the 38th parallel as the dividing line. The Soviets accepted their proposal and agreed to divide Korea.
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