After 37 months of devastating combat that killed an estimated 3 million people, negotiators at Panmunjom signed the Korean War Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953, at 10:01 a.m., halting one of the deadliest conflicts of the twentieth century. American, Chinese, North Korean, and United Nations commanders affixed their signatures to a document that froze the front line near the 38th parallel, effectively where the war had begun in June 1950. Lieutenant General William Harrison signed for the UN Command; General Nam Il signed for North Korea and China. The ceasefire took effect twelve hours later, and the guns went quiet across a peninsula that outside powers had used as a proxy battlefield for Cold War supremacy. Critically, the agreement was an armistice, a suspension of hostilities, not a peace treaty, leaving North and South Korea technically at war to this day. That unresolved legal status shapes every nuclear standoff, every diplomatic overture, and every military exercise on the peninsula seven decades later.