The Third Korean War?

It is a little known fact but in the 1960s the North Koreans launched a campaign of terrorism, violence and infitration into South Korea in an attempt to stimulate an almost non-existent revolutionary movement in the South to mobilise the masses and rise up against their colonial masters (I promise I am being tongue-in-cheek). There is a label for this that I have not seen widely used in scholarship, but nonetheless wikipedia has the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Korean_War . As the trusty wikipedia page lists, the North Koreans became incredibly provocative and brazen in this period. If you doubt the veracity of the page then I will be happy to refer you to some reliable books that coroborate wikipedia.

Anyway yes, the North Koreans went so far as trying to assasinate the South Korean president Park Chung-hee. One gets a sense of the motives from the international circumstances of the time. South Korea was finally rising, a phoneix from the fires of the Korean War. Concomitantly, Vietnam was ablaze with an 'anti-imperialist' war of its own. The Vietcong must have appealed to the sensibilities of the North Korean leadership. By this time North Korea's elite was almost completely monolithic; it was composed of the Guerilla comrades of Kim Il Sung who fought with him during the 1930s. The idea of an armed insurrectionary guerilla struggle that mimiced the North Vietnamese strategy must have been very appealing. The country had been heavily militarising since the early 1960s, after the initial rehabilitation of North Korean heavy industry post-(1st) Korean War. Therefore an educated guess would be that Kim sought to ferment uprising and struggle in the South that could be used as a pretext for an invasion of the south. He went so far as to set up a Southern party 'The Revolutionary Party of Reunification' a meager and ineffectual group of Southern True Believers. From here came heightened border provocations, then two attempted assasinations of Park Chung-hee; first a raid on his residence, then another botched attempt that killed his wife instead. At around the same time as the first attempt in 1968, the North interdicted a US vessel,the Pueblo. The crowning and final event was the 'Axe Murder incident' where two US servicemen where murdered by North Korean soldiers for attempting to trim a tree.

Obviously the Cheonan incident is serious, and the mindless killing of young Korean men is abhorrent. Nevertheless, by comparison to the 'Second Korean War' this is a small incident. Furthermore the North Koreans have done even worse; they blew up a South Korean civilian airliner in 1987 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_858).

This is a time of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula, an icy freeze has set into Inter-Korean relations. Since the end of the Sunshine Policy, North Korea has repeatedly provoked the South, we learnt yesterday that the North sent two agents masquerading as refugees to kill Hwang Jang-yop (the highest ranking defector), they did not succeed but this is another compelling example the brazenness of the North. Nonetheless, there will not be a Korean War, do not fear, America and China would never allow it. The North needs Chinese material support for its continued existence, and China does not seek a war that could potentially destroy the Chinese economic miracle. The South may tough talk, but a war would destroy Seoul and endanger 10s of millions of Korean lives.