North Korea has long depended on tunnel technology. Tunnels hide some of the country’s biggest secrets. Between 1974 and 1990, four tunnels were discovered running from the North under the D.M.Z. deep into South Korea. There may be dozens more still undetected, South Korean officials told me. Pyongyang dug the tunnels through bedrock and later equipped them with lights and ventilation, to infiltrate troops into the South in the event of war. I visited the so-called Third Tunnel of Aggression earlier this month. It came within thirty miles of Seoul. It was large enough for thirty thousand troops to pass through in an hour. It was detected, on a tip from a North Korean defector, in 1978.
Visitors can now tour the tunnel after clearing a South Korean military checkpoint into the D.M.Z. You put on a hard hat and take a little tram down a steep slope, two hundred and forty feet into the earth. A list of instructions advises, in English and Korean, “Do not enter the tunnel drunk” and “People with respiratory and heart problems should not participate in this tour.” Claustrophobia, too. Access to the tunnel ends at a concrete slab installed by the South to demarcate the border. (...)
The challenge will be what North Korea actually surrenders. Kim will have to confess the location and details of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of tunnels on the other side of the D.M.Z. which hide his military treasures. “Some think North Korea has built ten thousand underground facilities since the nineteen-sixties,” the retired lieutenant-general In-Bum Chun, a former director of operational planning for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me. The facilities reportedly include troop bunkers along the D.M.Z.; facilities for up to five thousand metric tons of chemical weapons, one of the world’s largest stockpiles; underground hangars; and three underground runways to allow tunnel takeoffs by military aircraft.
[ed. Underground runways! See also: North Korea expands threat to cancel Trump-Kim summit, saying it won’t be pushed to abandon its nukes. They hate Bolton (for good reason).]
Visitors can now tour the tunnel after clearing a South Korean military checkpoint into the D.M.Z. You put on a hard hat and take a little tram down a steep slope, two hundred and forty feet into the earth. A list of instructions advises, in English and Korean, “Do not enter the tunnel drunk” and “People with respiratory and heart problems should not participate in this tour.” Claustrophobia, too. Access to the tunnel ends at a concrete slab installed by the South to demarcate the border. (...)The challenge will be what North Korea actually surrenders. Kim will have to confess the location and details of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of tunnels on the other side of the D.M.Z. which hide his military treasures. “Some think North Korea has built ten thousand underground facilities since the nineteen-sixties,” the retired lieutenant-general In-Bum Chun, a former director of operational planning for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me. The facilities reportedly include troop bunkers along the D.M.Z.; facilities for up to five thousand metric tons of chemical weapons, one of the world’s largest stockpiles; underground hangars; and three underground runways to allow tunnel takeoffs by military aircraft.
by Robin Wright, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Olivier Mirguet / Agence VU/ Redux[ed. Underground runways! See also: North Korea expands threat to cancel Trump-Kim summit, saying it won’t be pushed to abandon its nukes. They hate Bolton (for good reason).]
