DIVIDED We Stand.

• Author: Sims, Calvin

FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE WAR, NORTH AND SOUTH KOREA HAVE BECOME VASTLY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES

As Byung Joo Min, 52, reaches the summit of Mount Kumgang in North Korea, she lets out a scream. "Wow, it's more beautiful than I ever imagined," she says. But as she savors the panoramic view, she can't help but scan the countryside for her father, whom she last saw when she was 2, before he was captured by North Korean forces during the war between North Korea and South Korea 50 years ago.

"He's out there somewhere," she says. "I can just feel it."

For decades, North Korea refused to allow South Koreans to enter, even though many Koreans have family on both sides of the border. But recently, North Korea has taken several small steps toward openness, including allowing outsiders to visit Mount Kumgang, a place Koreans consider sacred. So far, about 150,000 South Koreans have visited, many rediscovering long-buried, bittersweet emotions when they reach the top.

Fifty years after the Korean War, which began June 25, 1950, tensions between North and South Korea remain high. The first armed conflict of the Cold War between Communism and capitalism, the Korean War pitted the Communist North, backed by China and the Soviet Union, against the capitalist South, backed by the United States. It ended in a draw. After 5 million people--including 34,000 U.S. soldiers--were killed and nearly every village leveled, neither side had gained or lost much territory.

SOUTH WINS ECONOMIC WAR

But in the battle over ideology and economics, today the winner is clear. The South has developed into a democracy and one of the wealthiest nations of the world, while the repressive and isolated North is one of the poorest.

Despite a 1953 truce, the two sides never signed a peace treaty and technically remain at war. Only a few miles south of Mount Kumgang lies the 151-mile-wide demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula, one of the last frontiers of the Cold War. Hundreds of thousands of troops guard the border, which is lined with barbed-wire fences, concrete bunkers, hundreds of land mines, and--because no one ever goes there--lush vegetation. President Clinton has called it "the scariest place on earth."

On opposite sides of the border, life is so different you almost forget that for most of the last thousand years, Korea was one country. The split came at the end of World War II, when Korea was occupied by the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south. The fates of the two nations today are linked to those of...