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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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Reader Comments: National Mobilization to Stop Trump War on North Korea; Saving Puerto Rico - U.S. Responsibility for Colonialism; The Harvey Weinstein Story; The Anti-War Movement and Ken Burns' PBS Series; Socialism - Readers Exchange Ideas; Reality Winner; Salsa Meets Jazz For Puerto Rico; ...and more

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.

The war hawks are wrong when they say that past negotiations, like the 1994 Agreed Framework, didn’t make a difference. August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction.

In the West, treatment of North Korea is one-sided and ahistorical. No one even gets the names straight. But if American commentators and politicians are ignorant of Korea’s history, they ought at least to be aware of their own.