The Korean War Hasn't Officially Ended. One Reason: POWs

On July 27, 1953, North Korea and the United Nations signed an armistice to stop fighting and divided Korea at the 38th parallel. Technically, the war never ended as most of you know. An excerpt from the article:

"—but that doesn’t mean it’s over. Officially, the Korean War never technically ended. Although the Korean Armistice Agreement brought an end to the hostilities that killed 2.5 million people on July 27, 1953, that ceasefire never gave way to a peace treaty. At the time, South Korea’s president refused to accept the division of Korea.

A peace treaty between North Korea and South Korea today would be anything but symbolic, however: It could usher in real change in both countries. But should serious peace talks ever occur, they might run into a major obstacle: prisoners of war.

That might sound eerily familiar to anyone familiar with how the Korean War wound down. In 1953, prisoners of war became a thorny sticking point between both sides, threatening any chance of peace and contributing to an ongoing stalemate as millions died. Yet the end of the war hinged on successfully negotiating the fate of POWs on both sides. Those negotiations resulted in two massive prisoner exchanges that marked the war’s end.

The exchanges took place in two waves—Operation Little Switch, in which sick and wounded prisoners changed hands, and Operation Big Switch, the final push to exchange all remaining prisoners between sides. Fraught with controversy and risk, these prisoner of war exchanges were among the tensest moments of a war marked by catastrophe. And they still affect the chance of peace across the Korean peninsula."