Five years after the country’s partition, the communist leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, decided to attempt to reunify Korea under his control. On June 25, 1950, Kim launched a surprise invasion of South Korea.
On the surface, the Korean War seemed to be a war between South Korea and North Korea, but really the superpowers were just using it as a front to combat each other without actually going into a ‘hot war’
When Kim Il Sun invaded S Korea, Cold War assumptions governed the immediate reaction of US leaders, who instantly concluded that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had ordered the invasion as the first step in his plan for world conquest.
This collection of primary source documents assembles a record of Kim Il Sung's conversations with foreign allies and other outsiders from 1949 through 1986, providing insights into DPRK foreign policy and domestic politics
China's leading historian of the Korean War, Shen Zhihua, explains how Stalin and Mao saw the conflict on the Korean Peninsula and the lasting implications of the war for the Sino-Soviet alliance.
For the Soviet Union, the Korean Conflict was definitely the wrong war. Officially neutral, the Soviets nonetheless were vilified by both sides. U.S. officials saw Stalin as thepuppet master for the Communist side, while the Chinese resented being the water carrier for the
socialist camp
In order to safeguard its own political, ideological, and security interests, China quickly got involved in the war by sending the Chinese People’s Volunteer Armyo fight together with its DPRK friend against their common enemies.
Given the spread of the Cold War ideological paradigm and political contingencies and
goals after the Korean War, there was an all-out, effort to make anti-communism part of the Korean national psyche
