Nuclear Weapons are a Threat To World Peace :: Atomic Bombs

It is a well-known fact that the dropping of the two atomic bombs near the end of World War II in 1945 ushered in the dawn of the Atomic Age. For the first time in human history, the world was introduced to the awesome power of nuclear weapons. Since that time, there have been several different nuclear threats to the world, and one of those threats can be found along the Pacific Rim, in the country of North Korea. Like the dropping of the atomic bombs, it is also known that the North Korean government has admitted to possessing nuclear weapons, and in doing so, it stands as a silent, potential nuclear danger to the rest of the world. To understand this situation more fully, one must be given some background, starting in the early 1950s. Due to the harsh differences between the peoples of Korea, and especially due to the onset of Communism, the Korean War erupted and the nation split in half, with the Communist-supported Democratic People’s Republic in the north and those who favored democracy in the Korean Republic of the south (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2000). The two separate countries of North Korea and South Korea went their opposite ways, and each has experienced different fortunes in the past half-century. The South Koreans managed to recover from the turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s to become an economic power and a democracy supporter. On the other hand, North Korea can be viewed as a retro country, based first on a Communist ideology, laid down by leader Kim Il Sung and inherited by his son, the current dictator Kim Jong Il, then evolving into a totalitarian state (Pacific Rim: East Asia at the Dawn of a New Century). Today North Korea holds the distinction of being one of the very few remaining countries to be truly cut off from the rest of the world. Author Helie Lee describes this in her novel In the Absence of Sun: â€Å"An eerie fear crawled through my flesh as I stood on the Chinese side of the Yalu River, gazing across the murky water into one of the most closed-off and isolated countries in the world.† (1)