The ‘God Damn’ Tree That Nearly Brought America and North Korea to War

On August 18, 1976, the North Korean axe murder incident occurred. Two American soldiers tasked with cutting down a poplar tree blocking the view of UN observers were killed by North Koreans claiming it was planted by Kim Il-sung in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. An excerpt from the article:

"When the axe attack occurred, in 1976, Kim Jong Un hadn’t yet been born. The New York Times was, at the time, describing Donald Trump as a rising, Robert Redford–esque real-estate promoter with “flair” and “dazzling white teeth.” As for Moon Jae-in, the current president of South Korea, he was serving as a corporal in a special-forces brigade that would later help avenge the murders by carrying out the most elaborate and dangerous tree-cutting operation in history—an act that brought the United States and North Korea closer to all-out conflict than they have been at any other time since the end of the Korean War. Moon “experienced what being on the brink of a war was actually like,” the South Korean president’s office told me. Moon, who went on high alert but didn’t directly participate in the operation, has said that his patriotism and convictions about how to ensure South Korea’s security were forged at this very moment.

The long arm of this long-forgotten episode doesn’t stop at South Korea’s president, who has steered Trump and Kim from nuclear brinkmanship to nuclear talks in Singapore. Kang Myong Do, a North Korean defector and son-in-law of a former North Korean premier, once traced the roots of the decision by Kim Jong Un’s grandfather and father to develop nuclear weapons to the “apprehension [of] the ruling class,” which “started with the ... 1976 tree-cutting incident at the Demilitarized Zone” when “they were on the verge of war.” At the time, according to this theory, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il feared defeat at the hands of a neighbor armed with American nuclear weapons. (While this is just one of many origin stories for the North’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, Kim Il Sung did start gathering nuclear technologies in the 1970s and ’80s.)

The incident is also a reminder that whiplash—the sudden lurching from dialogue to belligerence and back again—is a defining feature of the Korean conflict that long predates the Trump-Kim era. The events of 1976 were among dozens of moments over the years in which “we were a razor’s edge from one misperception or one bad judgment” plunging the peninsula into hostilities, the Korea scholar Van Jackson told me. And it captures the conundrum of how to deal with North Korean provocations, which has tormented everyone from Henry Kissinger—who oversaw the U.S. response to the axe murders and still occasionally advises Trump on North Korea—to Trump himself. “One always assumes the unlimited willingness of opponents to take risks,” Kissinger observed as he plotted retaliation in 1976. “The purpose of this exercise is to overawe them.”

Ultimately, that exercise “forced the North Koreans to lose face,” recalls Bill Ferguson, one of the U.S. soldiers who executed it. “You have to be strong. If there’s any sign of weakness, [the North Koreans] won’t respect” you. But the military operation was not what the troops at the Joint Security Area wanted, he told me. 'We wanted blood.'”