Why Is North Korea Relevant Today

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On January 6, an earthquake was detected near a North Korean nuclear testing facility. Kim Jong Un later claimed that this was due to the testing of North Korea’s first hydrogen bomb, which would be a very large step forward in their weapons development. News stories such as this have been dominating the media over the past few decades, with events such as this occurring seemingly every other month. North Korea, and its somewhat crazy lineage of leaders from the Kim family, has been a large topic of discussion ever since the early 1950s. Yet what is strange about this is that the Korean war is talked about very little in our culture. It’s very common to hear someone talk about World War 2 or even the Vietnam war, but the Korean war doesn’t …show more content…
It comes as no surprise for most people to hear that North Korea has threatened the United States or sometimes even Canada. But what seems strange about this is that no one seems to talk much about how we got into this position with the DPRK. The reason is of course due all the way back in the Korean war. When the US and Canada and other UN nations got involved, it became an extremely deadly war. Canada sent 27,000 soldiers, as well as eight naval vessels and a squadron of transport aircrafts, while losing 516 Canadians and wounding 1,200. Canadian Korean war veteran Don Hibbs says “There’s dirt, there’s dust. There’s people hollering, there’s people dying on both sides, you can hear them. It was terrifying.”. Over the course of the war, the US air force estimates that they dropped around 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea, which is greater than the amount of bombs dropped in the Second World War Pacific theatre. The fighting caused the lives of 12-15% of the Korean population. After seeing the amount of lives lost, both Korean and UN soldiers, it may be easy to see why North Korea hates us. We intervened their invasion of South Korea, which they might have taken. The reason they are testing nuclear weapons, such as the supposed hydrogen bomb referenced earlier, might be because they want to make up for what they failed at achieving in the early …show more content…
That is the belief that since the North-South Korean border stayed was basically the same before and after the war. This would mean that after all of the fighting, pushing DPRK forces from deep within the ROK’s boundaries back to the chinese border, back to where they started, it was a useless war and isn’t important to talk about. While it is true that the Korean war did cost the lives of many soldiers and innocent civilians, the fact of the matter is that it has happened, and that we need to understand the war in order to understand North Korea. Knowing how to negotiate peacefully with North Korea would be a very large step forward in terms of worldwide peace since they are the only nation to test nuclear weapons in the 21st

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