North Korea (officially the DPRK) occupies the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, bordering China and Russia, with Pyongyang as its capital. Following its division along the 38th parallel by the US and Soviet Union after World War II, the state was established in 1948, and its invasion of the South ignited the Korean War (1950–1953), which concluded with an armistice creating the DMZ. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to economic ruin and a catastrophic famine from 1994 to 1998, and in 2024 the country formally abandoned its quest to reunify with the South. Governed as a totalitarian hereditary dictatorship under the Kim family's cult of personality, the Workers' Party of Korea holds a monopoly on power, with Amnesty International ranking its human rights record as the worst in the world. Highly militarized, it possesses nuclear weapons and fields the world's fourth-largest active-duty army (1.28 million troops).