Portside

To help make peace in Korea, the U.S. should follow South Korea's lead and apologize for its role in the devastating Jeju massacre.

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Not since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets exploded thermonuclear bombs, has the world been such a powder keg!

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With respect to Korea, what Americans get from their mainstream news media abounds with crucial omissions and misleading distortions resulting in a false portrayal of the geopolitical realities.

When the US entered the nuclear age, it did so recklessly. New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973. The nuclear bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in 250,000 deaths. And now, Donald Trump is threatening to use nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula.

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The current conflict is one of the many unintended consequences of the continuing Cold War and the arbitrary division of the Korean peninsula that has lasted to this day. In a military confrontation with the United States, North Korea faces a terrible choice between using its weapons first or losing them in a conventional war against a far superior power.