Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, has pledged to expand his nuclear arsenal in response to the ongoing South Korea–US military drills, which he described as an invasion rehearsal. The statement was made on August 18 during a visit to the destroyer ship Choe Hyon, one of the newest assets of North Korea's military.
The drills Kim Jong-un referred to are the annual large-scale exercises involving the US and South Korea, which just started and in the course of 11 days will mobilize 21,000 troops, 18,000 of them South Koreans. Despite the inclusion of nuclear-capable systems, South Korea has described them as defensive.
These exchanges reveal how, more than 70 years after the end of hostilities, tensions remain high along the North Korea–South Korea border, as the two nations are still technically at war.
The Korean War, which occurred between 1950 and 1953, took place largely out of the view of the global public, receiving little media attention in the United States and sparking very little protest among its citizens.
On the Korean Peninsula, however, the war was all-encompassing. The superpowers of the Cold War used North and South Korea’s struggle for unification to further their own aspirations of global hegemony, at the cost of millions of lives. Global ignorance regarding the true events of the Korean War persists today, as it remains in the shadows of the infamous wars that preceded and followed it.
It’s time for a history lesson. Read on to learn more about the Korean War.