Biology Forums - Study Force

Describe how the Korean War was a direct result of the Cold War and discuss the outcome of the war?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

ANSWER:
By the end of the Second World War, Soviet troops controlled the Korean peninsula north of the thirty-eighth parallel, while American troops controlled the south. When these two powers could not reach an agreement to hold countrywide elections, a communist North Korea and a noncommunist South Korea emerged as independent states in 1948. Two years later North Korea invaded South Korea. The United Nations Security Council, in the absence of the Soviet delegation, condemned the invasion and called on its members to come to the defense of South Korea. In the ensuing Korean War, which lasted until 1953, the United States was the primary military ally of South Korea. Victories by American and South Korean forces forced North Korean forces north until the Peoples Republic of China entered the war in support of North Koreas communist regime. Because the United States feared that launching attacks into China might prompt Chinas ally, the Soviet Union, to retaliate, the conflict remained limited to the Korean peninsula. When the contending armies eventually reached a stalemate along the thirty-eighth parallel, the two sides agreed to a truce but could not agree to a formal peace treaty. As a result, fear of renewed warfare between the two Koreas has lingered until the present.