Could North Korea provoke a new Korean war?
To fear a new Korean War is historically inaccurate, because, in fact, the last one never ended: the world’s most dangerous border, across which some 2 million North Korean, U.S. and South Korean troops face each other along the 38th parallel of the Korean Peninsula is, in fact, simply an armistice line. On July 27, 1953, the U.S. and North Korea signed a truce pausing, but not ending, a war that claimed more than 2 million lives, including those of 36,940 U.S. troops. And the North’s recent nuclear and missile saber-rattling has many growing nervous about the potential for a resumption of hostilities. North Korea, in fact, announced on May 27 that it was withdrawing from the armistice. It declared it could no longer guarantee the safety of ships sailing through the Yellow Sea off its western coast, and would no longer respect the legal status of several islands off South Korea’s coast. It also vowed to attack South Korea if North Korean vessels suspected of smuggling nuclear and missi
