From one Korea to two: the Korean war set North and South Korea on separate paths--one toward democracy and prosperity, the other toward tyranny and famine.

• Author: Perlman, Merrill

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

If you decide to visit North Korea, don't bother taking your laptop or your cellphone. Even if the North Koreans let you in--and that's not likely--they're going to keep your devices out. Besides, the Internet is heavily restricted, and about the only place with cell service in this country the size of Pennsylvania is the capital, Pyongyang.

Unlike South Korea, the modern and democratic nation with which it shares the peninsula, North Korea has few cars, few factories which mostly make military equipment--a lot of hunger, and the sense that the country hasn't moved very far into the 20th century, much less the 21st.

North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, rules 23 million people with an iron hand and very bizarre behavior: He almost always appears in public in a khaki jumpsuit, oversize sunglasses, and platform shoes; he rarely smiles, and has a taste for caviar and Rambo movies. Jon Stewart called him "a comic supervillain."

Yet he has made his nation into a nuclear power and has the uncanny ability to confound far larger and more powerful countries--most notably the United States, China, and Russia.

This contrast--a repressed, hungry citizenry that lays food at statues of its leaders, while those leaders play cat-and-mouse with the West--has existed since the three-year Korean War began 60 years ago, in June 1950.

The Korean Peninsula with its mountainous industrialized north, rich with minerals and hydroelectric potential, and a strong agricultural base in the south was long coveted by Korea's neighbors, Russia, Japan, and China, which fought several wars over it. Japan annexed the peninsula in 1910 and brutally suppressed Korean culture in favor of Japanese.

As World War II ended with the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Soviet Union rushed troops into Korea from the north, and the U.S. sent troops in from the south. They agreed to divide the country along the 38th Parallel line of latitude bisecting the country.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The division was 'supposed to last only until Japanese influence could be removed. But in 1948, Korean nationalists in the north led by Kim Il Sung, a communist-leaning guerrilla, declared the Democratic People's Republic. With Soviet help, Kim built a strong army and assumed dictatorial powers.

THE COLD WAR

South Korea held elections sponsored by the United Nations, and Syngman Rhee became the nation's first President; he aggressively promoted attacking North Korea and used troops to control civil unrest at home.

At the same time, the Cold War, which pitted the U.S. and its Western allies against their Communist foes in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, was heating up. In 1949, China fell to the armies of the Mao Zedong. In Europe, the U.S. was airlifting supplies to West Berlin to keep it from falling under Soviet control, and a civil war in Greece led America's leaders to believe Greece and Turkey might become Communist.

President Harry S. Truman had already declared that as the world's leader, the U.S. had a responsibility to protect nations threatened by communism; the fear was that if one nation fell to the Communists, another would follow, and so on, like dominoes. (This became known as the "Domino Theory.")

So when North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel on June 25, 1950, claiming they were retaliating for a South Korean attack, those conditions "made it nearly impossible for President Truman not to act," says Paul Edwards, founder of the Center for the Study of the Korean War in Independence, Missouri. North Korean troops quickly advanced 25 miles to the outskirts of Seoul, the South Korean capital.

At the urging of General Douglas...