Korean Armistice Agreement

• 1. Introduction

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  The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on the 27th of July 1953, ending three years of open warfare on the Korean peninsula. It did not end the war. No peace treaty followed. The two Koreas have lived under that fragile, temporary document ever since.

  On that July morning at 10:00 a.m., two men sat down to sign a document neither side had fully wanted. William K. Harrison Jr. signed for the United Nations Command. Nam Il signed for the Korean People's Army and the Chinese People's Volunteer Army. Twelve hours later, every regulation in the agreement took effect. Guns fell silent along a fortified strip of land that would become the most heavily defended border in the world.

  What drove two sides into two years of negotiations before they could agree to stop fighting? How did a military ceasefire meant to last months become a permanent substitute for peace? And why does the agreement remain contested, violated, and threatened with cancellation to this day? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Push Toward Talks

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  By mid-December 1950, the United States was already sketching the outlines of a deal. The desired agreement would halt the fighting, guard against its resumption, and secure the future of United Nations Command forces in the region.

  Among the thorniest early demands: a demilitarized zone roughly 20 miles wide, a joint military commission to oversee compliance, and a prisoner exchange on a one-for-one basis. Both sides would also need to stop importing additional troops, aircraft, and naval units into Korea.

  President Syngman Rhee of South Korea stood against any such deal. In late May and early June of 1951, he argued that his army should keep marching north until it reached the Yalu River and united the peninsula by force. The South Korean National Assembly unanimously passed a resolution supporting that goal. By the end of June, however, the Assembly reversed course and endorsed armistice talks. Rhee continued to object.

  North Korea's Kim Il Sung held an equally maximalist position. His side did not formally shift its slogan from "drive the enemy into the sea" to "drive the enemy to the 38th parallel" until the 27th of June 1951, seventeen days after armistice talks had already begun. The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, whose support kept North Korea fighting at all, pressured Pyongyang into accepting negotiations.

• 3. Two Years at the Table

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  Armistice talks opened on the 10th of July 1951 in Kaesong, a North Korean city in North Hwanghae Province near the southern border. The two lead negotiators were General Nam Il, a North Korean deputy premier, and United States Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy.

  Within two weeks, the delegates agreed on a five-part agenda covering the demarcation line, a ceasefire mechanism, a supervisory body, prisoner arrangements, and recommendations to both governments. That agenda guided negotiations for the next two years.

  Progress was rarely swift. The longest pause began on the 23rd of August 1951, when North Korea and its allies claimed the conference site had been bombed. A UNC investigation found evidence that a UNC aircraft had indeed struck the area, though that evidence appeared to be manufactured. The communists then refused to allow a follow-up investigation during daylight hours. Talks did not resume until the 25th of October 1951. From that point, negotiations moved to Panmunjom, a village in Kyonggi Province close to both sides of the border, with protection of the site shared between the two powers.

  Prisoners of war became the single most intractable issue. The communists held roughly 10,000 prisoners; the UNC held around 150,000. The problem was not the numbers but the unwillingness of many prisoners to go home. Large numbers of Chinese and North Korean soldiers refused repatriation, which Beijing and Pyongyang found unacceptable. The final agreement solved the problem by creating a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission, chaired by Indian General K. S. Thimayya.

  In December 1952, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower flew to Korea to assess the situation personally. According to Kenneth Nichols, Eisenhower ended the stalemate by discretely threatening to use atomic weapons if the North Koreans and the Chinese refused a ceasefire. The death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 also accelerated things. The new Soviet leadership issued a statement two weeks after Stalin died calling for a quick end to hostilities. By the 19th of July 1953, delegates had reached agreement on every point on the agenda.

• 4. What the Agreement Actually Said

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  No nation signed the Korean Armistice Agreement. It is purely a military document, binding the commanders of armed forces, not the governments behind them.

  The armistice called for a "complete cessation of all hostilities in Korea by all armed forces," enforced by the commanders on both sides. It established a Military Demarcation Line and created the DMZ as a 2.5-mile-wide fortified buffer zone. That zone followed the Kansas Line, which marked where the two sides actually stood when the ink dried.

  On prisoners, the agreement was precise. Within sixty days of the agreement taking effect, each side was required to repatriate all prisoners who wished to return. Ultimately, more than 22,000 Korean People's Army and Chinese People's Volunteer Army soldiers refused to go north. On the other side, 327 South Korean soldiers, 21 American soldiers, and 1 British soldier refused repatriation and stayed in North Korea or China.

  To prevent either side from quietly rearming, the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission was created. Inspection teams from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland were stationed throughout Korea to monitor compliance. That mechanism would not survive the decade intact.

• 5. America Breaks Paragraph 13d

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  Paragraph 13d of the armistice forbade either side from introducing new weapons into Korea beyond piece-for-piece replacement of existing equipment. In September 1956, the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Radford, signaled that Washington intended to bring atomic weapons onto the peninsula. Both the National Security Council and President Eisenhower approved the plan.

  The immediate trigger was a surge in North Korea's military capacity: the number of jet fighters had grown from zero to 500, and jet-ready airfields from zero to 25. Third-party inspection teams were being stalled or slowed. Rather than pursue the violation through the commission, the United States chose unilateral action.

  At a meeting of the Military Armistice Commission on the 21st of June 1957, the United States formally told North Korean representatives that the United Nations Command no longer considered itself bound by paragraph 13d. By January 1958, nuclear-armed Honest John missiles and 280mm atomic cannons were deployed in South Korea. Within a year, atomic demolition munitions and Matador cruise missiles capable of reaching China and the Soviet Union had followed.

  The Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, already weakened, effectively lost its purpose after the abrogation. It shrank to a small office-based presence inside the DMZ. North Korea responded by digging massive underground fortifications designed to survive a nuclear strike and by pushing its conventional forces close enough to the front that any nuclear strike would endanger South Korean and American troops as well. In 1963, North Korea asked China and the Soviet Union for help building nuclear weapons. Both refused.

• 6. A Document Under Constant Siege

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  South Korea never signed the armistice at all. President Rhee refused to accept a document that left Korea divided. China normalized relations with South Korea and signed a peace treaty with Seoul in 1992. In 1994, China withdrew from the Military Armistice Commission, leaving only North Korea and the UN Command as effective parties.

  North Korea announced its intention to abandon the armistice at least six times: in 1994, 1996, 2003, 2006, 2009, and 2013. Each announcement came with its own pretext. In 1994, North Korea said the US deployment of Patriot missiles in the south had already ended the armistice. In 2013, it argued that the agreement had been a transitional measure all along and that the supervisory machinery was effectively dismantled.

  In March 2013, North Korea scrapped all non-aggression pacts with South Korea, closed the border crossing, and cut the direct phone line between the two governments. It declared the right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. A UN spokesman responded that the armistice had been adopted by the General Assembly and could not be dissolved unilaterally. On the 28th of March 2013, two B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew from the United States to South Korea in the first non-stop round-trip B-2 mission to Korea, dropping inert munitions on a South Korean bombing range. North Korean state media announced that rockets were being readied to strike American targets.

  By 2011, South Korea had officially counted 221 North Korean violations of the armistice.

• 7. Toward a Peace Treaty

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  Article IV of the armistice called for a political conference within three months of signing to address a final settlement. The Geneva Conference convened in April 1954, six months late. Chinese diplomat Zhou Enlai formally raised the question of a peace treaty with US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The United States declined to engage. The conference ended without progress on the Korean question.

  More than six decades later, a different kind of meeting produced a different kind of statement. On the 27th of April 2018, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed the Panmunjom Declaration, committing both countries to denuclearization and to converting the armistice into a full peace treaty. The two leaders agreed to pursue that conversion before the end of that year.

  North Korea pulled back from those commitments before the year was out, citing US-South Korean military exercises. The summit between Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump, held on the 12th of June 2018 at the Capella Hotel in Singapore, produced a joint declaration pledging new relations, a stable peace regime on the peninsula, denuclearization, and the return of prisoner-of-war and missing-in-action remains. Follow-up negotiations were assigned to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

  The 27th of July is now marked differently on each side of the DMZ. In the United States, presidents since Eisenhower have proclaimed it National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day. In North Korea, the date is celebrated as the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War. The same day, the same document, remembered as two entirely different outcomes.