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The Korean Conflict Continues
| Article
# : |
10637 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
2,193 Words |
| Author
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William J. Taylor, Jr.
William J. Taylor, Jr., is vice president, International
Security Affairs at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington, D.C. |
Forty years ago, on July 27, 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed at Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea. The armistice stopped a bloody war that had resulted in an estimated two million men dead, wounded, or missing and major destruction of towns, villages, and industries. After all these decades a peace treaty has not been signed.
Over the subsequent years of the Cold War, North Korea built up a large standing military force of 1.1 million armed with fairly modern military equipment from its Soviet and Chinese allies. In a close alliance with the United States, South Korea developed a modern military of 650,000. Until recent reductions, this Combined Forces Command (CFC) included up to 47,000 U.S. troops on Korean soil.
Nowhere was the Cold War more manifest than along the DMZ, where North Korea has kept about 60 percent of its forces dug in and forward deployed. This is only 25 miles from Seoul, which is well within range of the North's missiles, aircraft, and mechanized ground forces. The CFC has been kept at a high state of conventional-force readiness protected under the U.S. nuclear umbrella that included ground- and air-based tactical nuclear weapons--until they were withdrawn from Korea and elsewhere under President Bush's September 1991 initiative to remove forward-based nuclear weapons worldwide.
Deep mutual distrust and constant political and military tensions gave rise to many military incidents and violations along the DMZ. From 1976 forward, the CFC conducted a large, annual, defensive military training exercise known as Team Spirit. Pyongyang felt threatened by the event, believing the exercise could turn into an attack on the North almost without notice. Each Team Spirit exercise led the North to put its forces on a higher state of alert and to maneuver them farther away from the DMZ. Simultaneously, the North suspended dialogue with the South for the duration of Team Spirit. During these times, the potential for war by accident or miscalculation was high.
With the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and China's high-priority drive toward modernization, North Korea began to lose the support of its major patrons. Russia and China began to demand hard currency for military hardware, oil, and major commodities. Under a command economy in deep trouble, with perhaps 25 percent of its GNP devoted to the military, and after defaults on several large international loans, Pyongyang found that its basic lack of hard currency became a major problem.
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