In Korea, however, America avoided defeat. The peninsula was first divided up in a panic at the end of World War II. Japan lost Korea, along with all of its other colonies, after its defeat at the hands of the Allies. Two days after the US dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and Stalin’s troops began to move quickly down the Korean peninsula. Perhaps worried that the Red Army would occupy the whole thing, US government officials, without consulting anyone from any other country, literally used a National Geographic map to decide on dividing the peninsula at the 38th parallel. Separate governments formed in each half of the country. The US organized elections for a legislature in 1948, and although the UN certified those elections as “free and fair,” the franchise was limited to landowners, taxpayers, and village elders. This arrangement satisfied nobody. Koreans did not want their civilization, which had existed for thousands of years, to be split in half. Political unrest and border conflict became more common in the latter half of the 1940s, and civil war decisively broke out on June 25, 1950. There is much arguing about whether the North invaded in a conquering spirit or because it was provoked, but it doesn’t matter. The political situation was intolerable, and the US had blocked all possible avenues to its resolution. The question would have to be decided by war.