North Korea was officially called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is a country in the northern part of the Korean peninsula. North Korea is next to China, Russia, and South Korea. The capital city of North Korea is Pyŏngyang, which is also the largest city. North Korea was founded in 1948 after it had been freed from Japanese occupation, but the southern half of the country is currently occuppied by the United States. At first there was a war between the armies of the North and South in what is called the Korean War, but the fighting stopped in 1953 while the war never fully ended. Afterwards, North Korea was friendly with China and Russia but never was formally allied with either and became more isolated over time. While the South went from one military dictatorship to another, the North went through steady development and was ahead of the South until the 1980s when the South became more democratic. Soon afterwards, the North's main trading partners collapsed leaving it stranded and isolated. Throughout the 1990s, North Korea suffered from famines and natural disasters. Afterwards, things stabilized but continued to lag behind the South. The country is organized along socialist lines, as all workplaces are public property and function along a universal plan. This is because the founders of North Korea were inspired by the ideas of communism. But as time went on, North Korea became more conservative and nationalist, and had less in common with other countries aiming for communism. To justify these differences, the country's leader Kim Il-sung said that the government was following his own ideology of "Juche", which means "self-reliance". Later on, the country's leaders began to remove "communism" from North Korean laws and philosophy. After Kim Il-sung died during the disasters of the 1990s, his son Kim Jong-il took his place and was promoted by the government as the leader who led North Korea out of the disasters. Kim Jong-il enacted a new policy of "Songun", or "military-first", which turned the country into a military state. When he died in 2011, his youngest son Kim Jong-un took his place and continues to lead the country today. People often think that North Korea is a communist country. It is actually a socialist-military dictatorship. In its most recent constitutional change, references to communism were removed. Large pictures of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin were removed from Kim Il-Sung square in 2012. The government has a similar structure to the former Soviet Union (USSR), once a close ally, but it is very different from the USSR. Leaders of the USSR were elected by a group of government officials. In North Korea, the new leader is the current leader's male heir. For this reason, North Korea is often referred to as a hereditary dictatorship. Even though the Demilitarized Zone is meant to stop problems between the two countries, sometimes soldiers on both sides of the border fire their guns at each other. A special town in the zone, Panmunjom, is called the Joint Security Area, or JSA, and sometimes the leaders of both countries meet there to talk about possibly coming back together. North Korea is one of the few countries in the world that has made nuclear bombs that can kill many people if it is exploded. North Korea will not say how many bombs it has, but other countries think that the North Korean government probably has built ten bombs so far out of a deadly element called plutonium. In October 2006, North Korea said that it tested one of its nuclear bombs. Although the North Korean government said that the test was not dangerous, many other countries and the United Nations were nonetheless enraged. Three years later in 2009, North Korea did another test, which broke a United Nations law called Resolution 1718, which said North Korea could not keep building and testing nuclear bombs. In 2010, a South Korean warship sank, killing over 40 soldiers. An international investigation concluded that