Around the edge of the baseball field at Camp Bonifas, South Korean marines under the UN Command are busy building four bomb shelters.
The US and South Korean troops at the camp are just 400m from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that has divided North from South Korea since the 1953 armistice. It has always been a tense place, ringed by razor wire and minefields, but now there is a particular urgency to the military spadework.
North Korea has carried out two major military attacks on the South in the past 15 months, and is widely believed in Seoul to be planning a third, in an attempt to extract diplomatic and economic concessions.
What makes the current situation so fraught with danger — some say the most perilous moment on the Korean Peninsula for a generation — is South Korea’s hard-line stance. The government of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, facing elections next year and criticism for its cautious response to the previous two incidents, is threatening to unleash a far more punishing response to any further “provocation,” setting the scene for an unpredictable tit-for-tat escalation.
South Korean islands along the western maritime border, the scene of the two earlier incidents, are bristling with new weapons. Government officials in Seoul confirmed that those new defenses will include Israeli-made Delilah missiles, with a range of 240km — enough to hit Pyongyang.
The South Korean military is meanwhile preparing new rules of engagement for its frontline troops that would allow it to respond “robustly” to an attack without immediately consulting the government in Seoul. Security officials talk of “proactive deterrence,” saying any future response would no longer be proportionate, but rather punitive enough to dissuade the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang from making further attacks.
A South Korean counterattack would target not just the North Korean units involved in any future military action, but command posts as far away as the North Korean capital. Officials in Seoul even talk of a future incident as “an opportunity” that would allow them to “restore” a working level of deterrence. However, it is a high-risk strategy.
“We are now in the most dangerous moment in Korean history over the last 25 years,” said Andrei Lankov, a Russian professor at Seoul’s Kookmin University. “South Korea has already committed itself to a strong reaction to a future North Korean provocation so many times and so loudly that if they don’t do it they will lose elections and be shamed.”
“So they will probably react. North Korea is not getting what they want [diplomatically] so they will probably use their usual trick of rising escalation,” he said.
Government officials in Seoul, speaking off the record, agreed that they were braced for a North Korean “provocation,” because Pyongyang’s peace overtures of the past few months have failed to persuade Seoul, Washington or Tokyo to enter a dialogue. All three capitals insist on a North Korean apology for the two previous incidents, the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan and the bombardment of the western island of Yeonpyeong, as well as concrete steps toward dismantling the North Korean nuclear program, as preconditions for talks.
“North Korea has been trying this peace offensive for the past seven months. Now is the time for the North Koreans to change their mode toward more a conflictual approach,” a former South Korean official and government adviser said.
Another reason Seoul expects another incident is that the regime in Pyongyang appears to be seeking to enhance the martial credentials of the heir apparent, Kim’s son Kim Jong-un, by flexing North Korea’s muscles.
Seoul’s bellicose language and heavy investment in border defenses is clearly aimed at dissuading Pyongyang from trying a repeat of the Cheonan or Yeonpyeong attacks. However, some observers doubt whether South Korea’s political leaders and military commanders, when the moment came, would actually order a response that risked triggering a full-scale war.
“I don’t know if there is real political will,” the former official said. “The new order being given to commanders is ‘shoot first and then call’ [Seoul]. But I don’t know if the field commanders will shoot. Also, while the rules of engagement have changed to more proactive deterrence, looking at the current deployment of forces, I don’t think we have the ability to execute that plan.”
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