โ The North Korean Famine took place between 1994 and 1998, with the U.S. Census Bureau estimating approximately 500,000 excess deaths over a seven-year period. Four decades prior, during the Korean War, the United States Air Force dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and napalm on North Korea. The indiscriminate bombing campaign destroyed 85% of all buildings in North Korea and killed an estimated 1,500,000 million North Koreans; of those, about 1,200,000 of them were civilians.