Korean Armistice Signed - July 27, 1953

The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on this day in 1953, ending active hostilities in the Korean War.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to this day in history class. It's July. An
armistice was declared in the Korean War on this day
in nineteen fifty three, and really nothing about this was
supposed to be permanent. Yet that armistice is still in
place today decades later. It goes back to the thirty
eight Parallel being established as the border between North and

(00:25):
South Korea at the end of World War Two. This
was not intended to be a permanent borderline was supposed
to be negotiated later, with people figuring out a more
concrete and specific plan for where that borderline should go.
But the United States and the Soviet Union were key
players and these negotiations for seeking a more permanent solution,

(00:46):
and the Cold War got in the way of doing
anything about what was supposed to be this temporary borderline.
The Korean War followed. On June nineteen fifty, North Korea
invaded South Korea. North Korea really wanted to unite both
Korea's into one nation, and it needed to be a
united country under a communist government. Unsurprisingly, the United States

(01:11):
got involved not long after and also called on the
United Nations for support. Then, in late nineteen fifty one,
China joined on the North Korean side, at which point
this just became a war of attrition. The armistice in
nineteen fifty three came after more than two years of
peace talks. This was the longest armistice negotiation in history,

(01:32):
and this war was ongoing the whole time that the
peace talks were going on. These talks included hints that
the United States might resort to using nuclear weapons to
end this war. So typically, at the end of a
war like this, the peace talks would end at an
actual treaty that was signed by all of the belligerents
in question, setting clear terms for the war. But this

(01:55):
armistice is more like a truce. It put a stop
to the active fighting without either side being able to
acknowledge the other as the victor. It suspended the open
hostilities between North and South Korea. It established a demilitarized
zone on either side of a borderline, and it prevented
both sides from entering the other through the air or

(02:17):
the ground or the sea. And it's set up a
process for transferring prisoners of war and displaced persons from
one place to the other. This armistice also required the
establishment of a Military Armistice Commission to make sure that
the armistice itself was not broken. This seems pretty tenuous,
and it was. Both sides were not even equally present

(02:40):
in signing the armistice. On one side where delegates from
China and North Korea, and on the other side was
a delegate from the United Nations Command delegation, and these
three delicates signed eighteen copies of the armistice in three
different languages. But you will notice South Korea wasn't actually
one of the signatories. This isn't like the most stable

(03:01):
ending to a war, and it really wasn't. The armistice
wasn't intended to last for this long. It was just
supposed to be a temporary measure that would stop the
fighting until North Korea and South Korea could work out
an actual peace agreement, and a conference was held in
Geneva in nineteen fifty four that was supposed to work
out the final terms, but the talks broke down. It

(03:22):
ended without actually reaching that agreement, and one of the
questions that prevented an agreement from being reached was how
to hold fair elections if Korea was unified into one nation.
So even though the United States has never signed a
peace agreement actually ending the war. The US isn't technically
still at war with North Korea because the United States

(03:44):
was never technically at war in the first place. The
United States framed its involvement in this whole conflict as
a police action, not a formal declaration of war. Although
korea nuclear weapons, peace talks, and the idea of a
unified Korea have all continued to make ongoing headlines even

(04:04):
in the weeks leading up to this episode of this podcast.
Thanks to Christopher Hasciotis for his research work on today's episode,
Anti Tory Harrison for her audio skills on all of
these episodes. You can subscribe to This Day in History
Class on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and wherever else you
get your podcasts. Tune in tomorrow for an unusual road

(04:25):
to a country's independence.