KOREA

Hot Battle in the Cold War,

1950 -

The Korean Peninsula

Located in a strategic position between China, Japan, and Russia

Has suffered nearly 900 invasions in its 2,000 years of recorded history five major periods of foreign

occupation China Mongols Japan

brutal occupation by Japan for 40 years prior to Japan's defeat in 1945 at the end of the Second World War

United States and the Soviet Union

Korea: 14 August 1945

Charles Bonesteel

Dean Rusk

Korea: North and South

North Korean Assault

Defense at Pusan

US Assault at Inchon

Initial Chinese Counter-Attack

Advance to the Yalu

Chinese Communist Assault

Second Invasion of South Korea

UN Counteroffensive

1951 – Early Offensives

1951 - Spring Offensives

1951 – Second Communist Wave

1951 – UN Offensive

1951 to 1953 - Stalemate

1953 – 2008 Armistice

The Korean peninsula is the only place in the world where the interests and security concerns of the United States, China, Japan, and Russia directly intersect. Yet, despite the pressures of the major powers, the independent-minded Koreans (North and South) have demanded to take their future into their own hands as never before.

North Korea

North Korea developed its own brand of communist Confucianism. It remains militarily powerful but economically isolated. Since the end of the Cold War it has lost the lavish subsidies it formerly received from the Soviet Union. And its once-close relationship with China has eroded as China becomes more interested in markets than Marxism. In the mid-1990s North Korea turned to the outside world for humanitarian assistance. Famine and poverty plague North Korea, periodically forcing it into a corner. Recently the North has taken small steps to reconcile with the South, while using the threat of its nuclear capability to gain concessions from the United States.

South Korea

South Korea is an economic powerhouse, with the world's eleventh-largest economy and one of the world's primary producers of ships, automobiles, electronics, steel, and other goods.

Its gross domestic product approaches one trillion dollars, and its per capita income is about $20,000 per year, twenty times that of North Korea.