Latest / Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries / The Two Koreas & the DMZ: The Line Drawn in 30 Minutes | History for Sleep with Rain Sounds

Transcript

The Two Koreas & the DMZ: The Line Drawn in 30 Minutes | History for Sleep with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good evening and welcome back to Sleepless History.
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to talk about a line.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a line that runs across a peninsula in northeast Asia.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: A peninsula shaped a little like a rabbit or a tiger, depending on which schoolbook you grew up with.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The line is roughly 155 miles long.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is about 250 km and it runs from the mouth of a river on the west coast to a stretch of rocky shoreline on the east coast.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not a river.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not a mountain range.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not a coastline or a water shed or a border between two languages or two religions or two ancient kingdoms.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of its length, it simply cuts across hills and rice paddies and forest, at an angle that makes no sense at all, if you are standing on the ground looking at it, and the reason it makes no sense is that it was not drawn on the ground.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was drawn in a room in Washington, D.C. in the middle of the night by two American army officers who had been given about 30 minutes and who did not have a proper map of Korea in the room.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so they used the one they had, which was a national geographic map of Asia.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the whole story in one sentence, and it is the reason this topic gets told and retold.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it is also only about 1% of what actually happened.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So tonight we are going to unfold the other 99%.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to talk about why those two officers were awake at that hour and what they had been asked to do and what they thought they were doing, which was not what they ended up doing at all.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to talk about the three years of occupation that followed and the war that came after that.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: a war that killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million people and ended not with a treaty but with a signature on an armistice at 10 o'clock in the morning on a summer day in 1953.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: A signature that was supposed to be temporary and is still more than 70 years later the only thing standing between two armies.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to walk down
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: into the strip of land that Armistice created, four kilometers wide, about two and a half miles, running the width of the peninsula, seated with something like two million land mines, watched by God posts and cameras and listening devices, and, because almost no human being has set foot in most of it since 1953.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Accidentally, one of the best preserved temperate habitats
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are cranes in there.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are agiatic black bears.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are probably, though, nobody can prove it, a few ammo leppards.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to visit a village in the middle of it, where soldiers from both sides once stood a few feet apart, with no war between them.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: When negotiators argued for two full years over a table, where men defected by sprinting across an open courtyard while bullets went past them.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and where, on a hot August morning in 1976, a work detail was sent to trim a poplar tree and two American officers were beaten to death with the axes their own men had brought, and the world came very close to a second Korean war.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over the branches of a tree, we are going to go underground into the tunnels.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Four of them found so far, drilled through granite, big enough in one case to move a division through in an hour, running from north to south beneath the line.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: discovered by accident and by defective testimony and by a man watching steam rise out of a rice paddy on a cold morning and then at the end we are going to come back up and look at the two countries that grew on either side of their accidental line.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and at how completely they diverged, same people, same language, more or less, same food, same family names, same thousand years of shared history, up until 1945, and then 70 some years apart, and the result is two societies that are now so different that reunification, the thing
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: has quietly been taken off the table by at least one of them.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is where we are going.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a lot of it.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will not be in a hurry.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, if you find these long episodes useful, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a comment or a review, wherever you are listening and subscribe or follow, so the next one turns up on its own.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It genuinely does help other tired people find the show.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, before we begin tonight's story, I wanted to say that sleepless history is independent with no network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: If these stories have become part of your nightly routine, you can support the show on Patreon, linked in the show notes.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early access, add free listening, and your favourite episodes with different or no background audio are waiting for you there.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if that's not for you right now, that's okay, simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for being here.
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, let us start in the summer of 1945, in a country that had not been its own country for 35 years.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, 2 kernels and a borrowed map.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Korean Peninsula sits in an awkward place.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It hangs down off the Asian landmass with China to the north and west.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Russia touching it at the very top northeast corner along a short stretch of river and Japan a short sea crossing to the southeast.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of recorded history, Korea managed this position by being a unified kingdom that paid formal respect to China and otherwise kept to itself.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The last of those kingdoms, the Josian dynasty, ruled for more than 500 years,
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: from the end of the 14th century until the beginning of the 20th.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Five centuries is a long time for any dynasty anywhere.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the 1800s, Korea had earned the nickname the Hermit Kingdom from Western writers because it very deliberately kept foreigners out.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because when foreign ships turned up asking for trade and coaling stations and missionary access, Korea said no, repeatedly and firm, that worked until it did not.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the second half of the 1800s and looked across the water at Korea, the way European powers were looking at Africa.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a war between Japan and China in 1894 and 1895.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fort largely over influence in Korea and Japan won it.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a war between Japan and Russia in 1904 and 1905.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fort largely over influence in Korea and Manchuria.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Japan won that one too, which astonished the world.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1905, Korea became a Japanese protectorate.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1910, Japan annexed it outright.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Korea ceased to exist as an independent state.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the 35 years of Japanese colonial rule that followed are not a footnote.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are the thing that shaped everything that came next.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they are also the reason, the division of 1945, landed on a population that was already exhausted and already politically fractured.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japanese rule was by the standards of colonial rule anywhere, extremely thought.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Japanese built railways, ports, factories, mines and hydroelectric dams, and they built most of the heavy industry in the north, where the coal and the minerals and the fast rivers were.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they left the south as the agricultural half, the rice bowl.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: That single fact, industry in the north, farming in the south, will matter enormously later.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They also set out, particularly after 1937, to erase Korean identity as a going concern.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Korean language instruction was cut back.
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then largely eliminated in schools.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Koreans were pressured and then compelled to adopt Japanese-style names.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shinto shrine attendance was made effectively mandatory.
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Korean language newspapers were shut down.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were conscripted as laborers and sent to mines and factories in Japan.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: tens of thousands of Korean women and girls were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military, a wound that is still right now an open diplomatic sore between soul and Tokyo.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Resistance took every form you would expect.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a mass nonviolent independence demonstration in March of 1919.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: the March First Movement, in which a declaration of independence was read out in a restaurant in Seoul and then in towns across the country, and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and the Japanese response killed somewhere between several hundred and seven thousand people depending on whose count you accept.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a government in exile that set up in Shanghai.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were armed guerrilla units operating out of Manchuria along the Chinese border.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: and one of the men fighting in those units.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a relatively small band, was a young Korean communist named Kim Sung-ju, who by the late 1930s was using the name Kim Il-sung.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were nationalists in the United States, raising money and lobbying, including a stubborn, difficult, Princeton-educated man, named Singman-Ree.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had a doctorate in international relations and a decades-long habit of telling Americans they were making a mistake.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hold on to those two names, Kim Il Sung in the Manchurian Hills and along the Soviet border.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Singmenry in Washington and Hawaii.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1945 they were both in a sense unemployed exiles.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within three years, each of them would be the head of a state.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the Allies did talk about Korea during the Second World War.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the Cairo Conference in November of 1943, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai Shek issued a declaration that said, among other things, that career should become free and independent in due course.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: In due course, those three words were doing an enormous amount of work.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roosevelt's actual idea, which he repeated at Tehran and again at Yalta, was a trusty ship, a period of joint supervision by the Great Powers, maybe 20 years or so, maybe 40, during which Koreans would be prepared for self-government.
• 12:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He mentioned that number out loud to Joseph Stalin at Yalta in February of 1945.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stalin reportedly said the shorter the better, which Koreans would later find bitterly amusing.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody asked any Koreans about this.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, the war ended much faster than anyone had planned for.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: and began pouring troops into Manchuria that night.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second bomb fell on Nagasaki on the 9th of August, and suddenly in Washington.
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A problem that had been comfortably theoretical became extremely urgent.
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet forces were already moving into the northern part of the Korean peninsula.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: American forces were not anywhere near Korea.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The closest large American formations were on Okinawa, 600 miles away, and in the Philippines, much farther than that.
• 13:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: If Japan surrendered in the next few days, which it plainly might, then whoever was physically standing on Korean soil would be the one accepting the Japanese surrender there, and whoever accepted the surrender would be the one in charge.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So on the night of the 10th of August,
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: and into the early hours of the 11th, the State War Navy Coordinating Committee met in Washington to sort out the surrender arrangements for the whole Pacific theatre.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was the interagency body that hammered out exactly these kinds of questions.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in the middle of that long night, the committee turned to Korea and asked a simple question.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where should the dividing line be between the zone in which the Soviets accept the Japanese surrender?
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the zone in which the Americans do.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two officers were sent into an adjoining room to come up with an answer.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: One was Colonel Charles Boensteel, a road scholar and a career officer who would eventually command all United States forces in Korea.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other was Colonel Dean Rusk, a former college professor, a staff officer who had served in the China Burma India Theatre and a man who 16 years later would become Secretary of State under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had about 30 minutes, Rusk wrote about this later in his memoir, and the account has the flat, slightly embarrassed quality of a man describing something he did quickly at two in the morning that turned out to matter for the rest of the century.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They did not have a detailed map of Korea, what they had in the room, was a national geographic map of Asia and the adjacent areas.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were looking for a line that would put the capital, Seoul in the American zone, because American policy makers felt strongly that the Americans needed the capital.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that would also be something the Soviets might plausibly accept, given that the Soviets were the ones with troops actually on the ground, and could have taken the entire peninsula in a matter of weeks, if they had wanted to.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They looked at provincial boundaries.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Provincial boundaries did not give them a clean line in the right place.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, they went with a parallel of latitude.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: because a parallel of latitude is easy to describe in a document and unmistakable on any map.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They looked at the 38th parallel norm.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It ran across the peninsula about two thirds of the way up.
• 16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It put soul comfortably in the south.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It split the country roughly in half by area, though it put about two thirds of the population and almost all the agricultural land in the American half.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And almost all the industry, the electricity generation and the mineral wealth in the Soviet half.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that was it.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was the process.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: 30 minutes, two kernels, a magazine map, and a round number.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rusk noted afterward that the line made no sense in military terms, that the 38th parallel was farther north than American forces could realistically reach quickly, and that he was frankly surprised when the Soviets accepted it without argument.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they did.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The proposal went into general order number one.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: the document laying out who accepted the Japanese surrender where, and Stalin raised no objection to the Korea provision at all.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet troops, who by then were already advancing south and could have kept going, stopped at the 38th parallel and waited.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why did Stalin accept?
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historians have argued about this for decades.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most common answers are that he was more interested in his position in Europe.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: and in Japan proper.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: that he expected a friendly settlement with the Americans over a trustee ship, and that he may have hoped for a zone of occupation in Japan itself in exchange.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not get one.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the bargain, whatever it was in his head, held and the line held.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first American troops did not arrive in Korea until the 8th of September, 1945, nearly a month after
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That month matters.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In that month, Koreans in the South did what people do when an occupying government collapses.
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They organized.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Local committees sprang up all over the country, thousands of them, calling themselves People's Committees.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 6th of September, representatives declared a Korean People's Republic, with a cabinet list that included both leftists and conservatives, including Sigmund Rhee, who was not in the country and had not been consulted.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: When left-handed General John Hodge arrived with the 24th Corps and took charge of the American Zone, he refused to recognise the People's Republic
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hodge was a competent combat commander with no diplomatic training and no background in Korea.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: His orders were vague, he had almost no Korean speaking staff.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, in one of the decisions that historians still shake their heads about, he initially kept the Japanese colonial administration in place to maintain order, including Japanese officials and Korean police who had worked for the Japanese.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reaction among ordinary Koreans was not mild.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hodge reversed course within weeks on the Japanese officials, but the Korean colonial police largely stayed on.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that fact that the men who had enforced Japanese rule were now enforcing American military government rule poisoned the politics of the South for years.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American military government in Korea, as it was formally called,
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, by most accounts, including many American ones, improvised and unhappy.
• 20:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It faced strikes, an autumn uprising in 1946, in which rural protests against grain collection turned into attacks on police stations, and a growing increasingly violent split between left and right.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the north, the Soviets took a different approach.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They also work through people's committees, but they steadily filled the leadership of those committees with Koreans who had been in the Soviet Union, or who had fought with Soviet aligned partisan units.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In October of 1945,
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: a young man in his early 30s was introduced to a crowd in Pyongyang as a great patriotic hero of the anti-Japanese struggle.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was Kim Il Sung, who had spent the last years of the war as a captain in a Soviet-sponsored brigade in the Russian far east.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and whose son, born there in 1941, had been registered under a Russian name.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not the most famous or the most senior Korean communist available.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was young, he had a genuine guerrilla record, and crucially he was someone the Soviets believed they could work with.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within a year he was chairman
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within two, the north had a functioning party state.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Had carried out a sweeping land reform that redistributed Japanese and landlord holdings to peasants and had nationalized industry.
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, in December of 1945,
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Foreign Ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain met in Moscow and announced the Trustyship Plan.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A joint commission to help form a provisional Korean government followed by up to five years of four power trustyship.
• 22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reaction in Korea, North and South, was fury.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Koreans had just endured 35 years of foreign rule.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when now being told they would need another five years of supervision, there were enormous demonstrations.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then the Korean communists, after some initial opposition, reversed and supported the trustee ship on instruction.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And from that moment, the split in Korean politics became a chasm.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: because now one side could accuse the other of selling out the nation to foreigners and the other could accuse the first of being reactionary collaborators.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The joint commission met, argued, and deadlocked, twice.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviets wanted the consultations limited to groups that supported the Moscow decision which would exclude most of the southern right.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans refused.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1947 the Commission was dead and the United States took the question to the newly formed United Nations.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United Nations General Assembly voted to hold supervised elections throughout Korea.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Soviets refused to allow the commission into the north.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in May of 1948, elections were held in the south only.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Republic of Korea was proclaimed on the 15th of August, 1948, three years to the day after the Japanese surrender broadcast with Singmenry as president.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed in the north on the 9th of September 1948, with Kim Il-sung as Premia.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each government claimed to be the sole legitimate government of the entire peninsula.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each regarded the other as an illegitimate puppet.
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soviet troops withdrew from the north by the end of 1948.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: American combat troops withdrew from the south by the middle of 1949, leaving behind a small advisory group.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both departing powers left behind armies they had trained.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviets left behind a much better one.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Korean people's army had tanks, 34 tanks, the same model that had rolled over Germany.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: along with artillery and aircraft and a core of veterans who had fought with Chinese communist forces in the Chinese civil war.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans worried that Sigmundry might start a war on his own, deliberately declined to give the southern army tanks heavy artillery or combat aircraft.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And along the 38th parallel, between 1949 and the spring of 1950, there were hundreds of armed clashes, not a quiet border, raids, ambushes, battalion-sized fights over hills.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: thousands of people died in these incidents, before anything anybody called a war had started.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the southern interior, meanwhile, a communist guerrilla insurgency was being fought and suppressed with considerable brutality, and on the island of Jeju, an uprising and counter insurgency campaign that began in 1948 killed a share of the island's population
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: that some estimates put as high as 1 in 10.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So by the spring of 1950, five years after two tired kernels drew a line on a magazine map to solve an administrative problem, that line had become a political border, then a military frontier, and was about to become a front.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter two, the war that did not end,
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It began at dawn on Sunday, the 25th of June, 1950 in the rain.
• 26:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korean artillery opened up along the 38th parallel, and then roughly 90,000 troops came across in a coordinated attack, spearheaded by about 150 tanks.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The southern army had no tanks, and nothing that could reliably stop a tank, within three days, soul had fallen.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: A bridge across the Han River was blown by southern engineers, while it was still crowded with refugees and retreating soldiers, killing hundreds of people and stranding much of the southern army on the wrong bank.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The speed of it startled everyone, including it seems, Stalin, who had approved the invasion only after Kim Il-sung asked him repeatedly over the course of a year and only after the Soviets had tested an atomic device and the Chinese communists had won their civil war.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American reaction was faster than Pyongyang expected.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for assistance to the Republic of Korea, and it passed because the Soviet delegate was not in the room.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union had been boycotting the security council for months, over the refusal to seek the new communist government of China, and so the veto simply was not cast.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the great waters of the 20th century.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it is why the force that fought in Korea was formally a United Nations command rather than an American one, eventually drawing troops from 16 nations, including Britain, Turkey, Australia, Canada, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Colombia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Thailand, Belgium, South Africa, Luxembourg and New Zealand.
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: the summer of 1950 went very badly.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: American units rushed from occupation duty in Japan were under strength, under trained, and equipped with worn-out weapons from the last war.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were pushed south again and again.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: By August, the entire remaining United Nations and South Korean force was crammed into a rectangle in the southeast corner of the peninsula, roughly 100 miles by 50 miles, anchored on the port of Pusan and shielded by the Naktong River.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was the Pusan perimeter.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It held through six weeks of ferocious fighting.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Partly because the defenders had interior lines and could shift reserves quickly, partly because of air superiority.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: and partly because the North Korean supply line was now several hundred miles long and being bombed constantly.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then came the gamble.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 15th of September 1950, General Douglas MacArthur launched an amphibious landing at Inchon, the port-serving soul, far up the west coast
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: told him it was a terrible idea.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inchon had some of the most extreme tides in the world, a range of about 30 feet, which meant the landing craft could only come in during narrow windows, or they would be stranded in remote flats.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The approach was a long, narrow, easily mined channel.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The landing beaches were sea walls in the middle of a city.
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: that because it was obviously impossible, the enemy would not be ready for it, and he turned out to be right.
• 30:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The landing succeeded, Seoul was retaken by the end of September, and the North Korean Army in the south suddenly cut off disintegrated.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here is the moment where the war could have ended roughly where it started.
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The original United Nations objective was to restore the situation at the 38th parallel that had been achieved.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, in early October, United Nations forces crossed the parallel and drove north with the new goal of unifying the peninsula by force.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They took Pyongyang on the 19th of October.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some units reached the Yalu River, the border with China.
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: China had warned through the Indian ambassador and through public statements that it would not tolerate American forces on its border.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those warnings were discounted.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 25th of October, Chinese troops attacked then melted away.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: In late November, they attacked in enormous numbers, somewhere around 300,000 men striking in the freezing dark at the extended and scattered United
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: What followed was one of the hardest retreats in American military history, including the fighting withdrawal from the Chosen Reservoir, where roughly 30,000 United Nations troops.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mostly, United States Marines fought their way out of an insurculment.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: by about 120,000 Chinese soldiers, in temperatures that dropped to 35 degrees below zero, cold enough that morphine had to be thawed in a medics mouth and blood plasma froze solid.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Seoul fell again in January of 1951.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then the front was fought back north again in the spring.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city changed hands four times in nine months and was by the end largely rubble.
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then the war got stuck.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the middle of 1951, the front had stabilised in a band of hills that ran more or less across the peninsula near the 38th parallel, though it slanted, the front sat somewhat north of the parallel in the east and somewhat south of it in the west, and there it stayed
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armistice Negotiations opened in July of 1951, at K-Song, an old city that had been the capital of the Corio dynasty, and which sat just below the 38th parallel, meaning it had been in the south before the war.
• 32:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The talks there went badly, and the location was compromised because K-Song was in communist held territory, and the northern side used that fact for propaganda.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Torx moved to a nearby Hamlet in the neutral zone between the lines, a place with a handful of buildings at a crossroads.
• 33:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its name was Pant Munjom, which comes from words meaning roughly the shop with the wooden plank door.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was not much there, a tavern, some huts.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The negotiators put up tents.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The delegates argued about the location of the demarcation line, about the composition of the Supervisory Commission, about airfield reconstruction, and about the single issue that dragged everything out the longest, which was prisoners of war.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The problem was this.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Standard practice under the Geneva conventions was that all prisoners are returned at the end of hostilities.
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when the United Nations Command screened the prisoners it held, a very large number of them, including tens of thousands of Chinese and a substantial number of North Koreans, said they did not want to go home.
• 34:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some were former nationalist Chinese soldiers,
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had been absorbed into the communist army.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some were South Koreans who had been conscripted by the North during the occupation of the South.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United Nations side took the position that no prisoner should be repatriated against his will, which was a principled stand and also an enormous propaganda prize.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The communist side took the position that all prisoners must be returned, full stop.
• 34:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: because a mass refusal to go home would be a humiliation.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So men sat in camps for two extra years while this was argued.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The camps themselves became battlegrounds.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the island of Koj.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: where the United Nations held tens of thousands of prisoners, communist and anti-communist prisoners for each other inside the wire, organized political structures, and in May of 1952, actually captured the American camp commandant, Brigadier General Francis Dodd, and held him hostage for several days until concessions were extracted.
• 35:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: not the United States Army's finest hour.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: While the talking went on, the fighting went on.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it took on the character of the Western Front in the First World War.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: trench lines, bunkers dug deep into hillsides, artillery jules of staggering intensity, attacks and counterattacks for hills known by numbers and nicknames, heartbreak ridge, bloody ridge, pork chop hill, the punchbow, old bouldie, outpost Harry, triangle hill,
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: and was in the strategic sense worthless, except that whoever held the high ground when the music stopped would hold it forever, because that was the arrangement.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once it was finally agreed, the line of contact, wherever it happened to be at the moment of the ceasefire, would become the boundary.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is why the fighting in the last months was so vicious.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the air wall was pounding the north into ruin.
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Estimates of the tonnage dropped on Korea, exceed what was dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of the Second World War.
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nearly every town of any size in North Korea was flattened.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dams were bombed, flooding rice fields.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the end of the war, North Koreans had learned to live, work, and go to school underground.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a deep cultural conviction that the Americans would come back and do it again was baked into the country permanently.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you want to understand why North Korea behaves the way it does about bunkers and tunnels and air defense, that is a substantial part of the answer, and it is not paranoid in the abstract.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It happened to them.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two things finally broke the
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: in March of 1953, and the new Soviet leadership wanted the war finished, and the new American President Dwight Eisenhower.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Elected in part on a promise to go to Korea, let it be understood through various channels that the United States was prepared to escalate, possibly with nuclear weapons, if the talks did not conclude.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Historians still argue about how much that threat mattered compared to Stalin's death.
• 38:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Probably less than Eisenhower thought, probably more than nothing.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1953, the two sides exchanged sick and wounded prisoners in an operation called Little Switch.
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June, they reached agreement on the prisoner question.
• 38:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: would be handed to a neutral commission, given 90 days during which representatives of their own side could try to persuade them and then released to go where they chose.
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, almost at the last moment, Sigmundry nearly blew the whole thing up.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was bitterly opposed to any armistice that left Korea divided.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted the war continued to unification.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 18th of June, 1953, on his orders.
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korean guards simply opened the gates at prisoner camps, and let more than 25,000 North Korean prisoners walk out into the countryside, where they vanished into the population.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a deliberate attempt to wreck the negotiations.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The talks survived it barely,
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: of an American security guarantee, promises evade and a very direct conversation about what would happen if he acted unilaterally.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: On 27 July 1953, at 10 o'clock in the morning, in a building at Panmunjom that had been constructed for the purpose in a matter of days.
• 39:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and general nam ill for the Korean people's army and the Chinese people's volunteers signed the armistice.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They did not speak to each other, they did not shake hands, they signed the documents, stood up and walked out through separate doors.
• 40:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: the whole ceremony took about 12 minutes.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The documents were then counter-signed elsewhere by General Mark Clark, by Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang, and by Peng De-wai.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korea never signed a tour and has never signed to this day.
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ceasefire took effect 22 hours later at 10 o'clock that night.
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the hours before it, artillery on both sides fired off everything they had rather than carry it back.
• 40:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, at 10, the gun stopped, and along the front men stood up out of their holes in the dark, and in many places cheered, and in some places simply sat down where they were.
• 41:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the armistice.
• 41:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the document that created the thing we are here to talk
• 41:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it is worth going through its arrangements carefully because the strangeness of the demilitarized zone is entirely a product of the strangeness of this agreement.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: First, it established the military demarcation line.
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the actual border, the line itself, drawn along the line of contact as it stood at the ceasefire.
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is marked on the ground by 1,292 signposts, spaced roughly 200 metres apart.
• 41:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: running from the mouth of the Imjin River on the west coast to the east coast near Gosong.
• 41:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The markers are yellow metal signs on posts, let it in Korean and English on the south facing side, and Korean and Chinese on the north facing side.
• 42:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them are now rusted, fallen, or swallowed by undergrowth.
• 42:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because they sit in a minefield,
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Replacing them is not a simple matter of sending out a man with a shovel.
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Second, it created the demilitarized zone.
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: A buffer, extending two kilometers north of the military demarcation line and two kilometers south of it.
• 42:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Four kilometers wide, in total.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: about 2.5 miles, running the full 250 km.
• 42:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The northern boundary and the southern boundary of that buffer are the lines that troops are not supposed to cross.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the zone, the agreement permitted only civil police and military personnel carrying specified small arms and forbade fortifications, heavy weapons and hostile acts.
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In practice, the zone became studded with guard posts on both sides almost immediately, and both sides have been quietly and sometimes loudly violating the de-militarisation clauses, since roughly the week it was signed.
• 43:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: third.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It set up the military armistice commission to supervise the whole thing, with representatives from both sides, meeting at Panmunjom, and it created a neutral nation's supervisory commission, staffed by Sweden and Switzerland on one side.
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Poland and Czechoslovakia on the other to monitor compliance.
• 43:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Swedes and the Swiss are still there.
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have been there in a camp beside the Truce village for more than 70 years.
• 43:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is possibly the longest running temporary assignment in the history of diplomacy.
• 43:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: forth, it left two special areas along the coasts, and it left unresolved the maritime boundary in the Yellow Sea, because the negotiators could not agree on it.
• 44:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: A United Nations Commander drew a line called the Northern Limit Line Unilaterally.
• 44:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea has never accepted it.
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that stretch of water has produced naval clashes in 1999, 2002, 2009, and 2010.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The last of which included the sinking of a South Korean Corvette, the Cheonan, with the loss of 46 sailors and the Shelling of Yon Pyong Island, and fifth crucially.
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The armistice was explicitly a military arrangement to stop the shooting until a political settlement could be reached.
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Paragraph 60
• 44:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: recommended a political conference within three months to settle the withdrawal of foreign forces and the peaceful settlement of the Korean question.
• 44:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That conference was held in Geneva in 1954.
• 45:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It accomplished nothing whatsoever.
• 45:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there was never a peace treaty.
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There has never been a peace treaty.
• 45:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: On paper, the Korean War has not ended.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has been paused since 10 o'clock on the evening of the 27th of July, 1953, and every single thing that has happened along that line since then has happened inside a pause.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cost of the three years is difficult to state precisely and worth stating anyway.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere around 36,500 Americans died, Britain lost more than 1,000.
• 45:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Turkey lost more than 700.
• 45:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korean military deaths are usually put at well over 100,000.
• 45:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chinese deaths, somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000, depending on the source, North Korean military deaths in the hundreds of thousands and civilians, north and south, died in numbers that no one can pin down.
• 46:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: from bombing, from massacres committed by both sides, from starvation, from exposure.
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The commonly cited total for all deaths is in the neighborhood of 3 million people, on a peninsula that had about 30 million inhabitants, roughly one person in 10, and 10 million people were separated from immediate family members, not distant relatives, parents from
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: husbands from wives.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of them never saw each other again because the line that closed behind them in 1953 did not open.
• 46:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3.
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The truce village and the poplar tree.
• 47:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us go and stand in the strangest few acres on earth.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the western part of the demilitarized zone, near the old road between Seoul and Pyongyang, there is a circle of flat ground about 800 meters across.
• 47:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the joint security area and it is the only place along the entire line where soldiers from the two sides have stood within arms reach of one another as a matter of routine.
• 47:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone calls it Pan Manjom.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: after the vanished village nearby.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though the actual hamlet of Panmunjom was destroyed and the sight of the talks is a short distance away.
• 47:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: People also call it the truce village, which is a lovely phrase for a place with that much tension in it.
• 47:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Picture it.
• 47:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: a wide paved courtyard.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the northern side a large grey building with a broad flight of steps and a balcony called Panmon Hall.
• 48:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the southern side a modern building of concrete and glass called Freedom House and between them sitting directly astride the border a short
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: painted a particular shade of pale blue, which is the color of the United Nations.
• 48:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three of them are the conference rooms.
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are aligned so that the military demarcation line runs straight through the middle of each one.
• 48:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And inside the main conference room, the line runs directly under the middle of the conference table, marked by a row of microphone cables laid across it, so that a delegate sitting on the south side of the table is physically in South Korea.
• 48:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a delegate sitting opposite him is physically in North Korea.
• 48:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when a tourist walks around the end of that table, as thousands have, they have technically entered North Korea and then come back out again without going through any sort of customs.
• 49:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Outside, across the courtyard, there is a raised concrete strip, a few inches high and about half a foot wide, running the width of the open ground.
• 49:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the line.
• 49:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: That little curb is the entire physical expression of the division of a nation.
• 49:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: On either side of it, for decades soldiers stood facing each other.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The southern side stationed men who were required to meet a minimum height, war mirage sunglasses, and stood in a modified Taikwondo ready stance.
• 49:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Half concealed behind the corner of a building, so that only half the body was exposed.
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The northern side stood in pairs, often with one man watching the other.
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: a practice that was widely understood to be about preventing defections.
• 49:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Behind the immediate area, there is a small bridge over a stream.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this bridge has one of the great names in the history of geography, the bridge of no return.
• 50:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It got that name in 1953, during the Great Prisoner Exchange called Operation Big Switch.
• 50:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: when prisoners were brought to the bridge and given a final choice.
• 50:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cross to the other side or stay.
• 50:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once you chose, you could never come back.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tens of thousands cross north.
• 50:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tens of thousands cross south or chose to go to neutral countries and among the people who went north across that bridge or in that period in one of the order footnotes of the whole affair were 21 American prisoners of war.
• 50:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: and one Britain who chose not to go home.
• 50:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of them eventually drifted back out of North Korean or to China over the following years.
• 50:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later, separately, four American soldiers deserted across the line during the 1960s, walking north through the minefields and found themselves in a situation from which there was no exit.
• 51:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them, Sergeant Charles Jenkins,
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: who crossed in January of 1965 after drinking 10 beers and deciding that this was a reasonable way to avoid combat duty in Vietnam spent 39 years in North Korea.
• 51:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was made to teach English at a military school and was put in propaganda films playing an evil American.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He married a Japanese woman, Hitomi Soga.
• 51:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had been abducted from her home island by North Korean agents in 1978.
• 51:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the many abductees whose fate became a major issue between Japan and North Korea.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jenkins was finally allowed to leave in 2004.
• 51:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Went to Japan.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: turned himself into the United States Army, served 25 days in confinement, and lived out his life, selling rice crackers in a souvenir shop on a small Japanese island.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: History is full of endings, nobody would dare to invent.
• 52:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back in the joint security area, the routine work of the place was the Military Armistice Commission.
• 52:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: hundreds of meetings across the decades in that blue building across that table with the microphone cables.
• 52:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both sides would come in, make statements, accuse the other of violations and leave.
• 52:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The meetings were frequently absurd.
• 52:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a famous and probably slightly embellished story of the two delegations sitting in total silence.
• 52:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: each refusing to be the first to call a recess for over 11 hours.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were disputes about the height of the flags on the table, which escalated until each side kept bringing a slightly larger flag.
• 53:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: until the flags could no longer fit in the room and an agreement had to be negotiated about flag dimensions.
• 53:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were disputes about the height of chairs.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you have a border and no relationship, the smallest physical details become the entire language.
• 53:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That same logic produced the two villages, which are, in their way, the most extraordinary thing in the zone.
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The armistice allowed each side to maintain one village inside the demilitarized zone.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the southern side is Daisyong Dong, known in English as Freedom Village.
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a real place with real people.
• 53:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Residents are mostly descendants of families who farm that land before 1953.
• 53:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: They live under strict conditions, a curfew, a headcount at night, identification checks, and soldiers escorting them to fields that sit close to the line.
• 54:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: In exchange, they are exempt from paying most taxes,
• 54:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the men are exempt from South Korea's compulsory military service and the farmland is unusually generous in size, which means the village has often been unusually prosperous.
• 54:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Children attend a small school with a handful of pupils per grade.
• 54:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the northern side, about a mile away, is Kijong Dong, which North Korea calls peace village.
• 54:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and which almost everyone on the southern side calls the propaganda village.
• 54:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: From a distance, it looks like a prosperous little town.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rose of multi-street buildings in bright colors, a large civic structure, what appears to be a school, observers with telescopes noticed, over the years, several odd things.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lights in the buildings came on and went off all at once on a schedule, as if wired to a single switch and appeared to illuminate no particular rooms.
• 55:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were no glass pains in many of the windows.
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There appeared to be no interior floors in some of the buildings at all, just concrete shells with painted on window frames.
• 55:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: street sweepers appeared on a routine, sweeping empty streets.
• 55:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The southern assessment, which North Korea denies, is that most of the village is a stage set populated by a small maintenance crew built to be looked at.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there is the flagpole war, which is one of the purest distillations of the whole 70-year argument.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1980s, South Korea erected a flagpole at Daisyong Dong, about 100 meters tall, flying a large national flag.
• 55:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea responded by building one at Kijong Dong, about 160 meters tall, which for a time was the tallest flagpole in the world, flying a flag that weighs somewhere around 270 kilograms.
• 56:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: roughly 600 pounds.
• 56:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So heavy that in light wind it cannot fly properly and simply hangs, and so heavy that it has to be taken down in the rain to keep it from tearing itself apart under its own soaked weight.
• 56:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were also loud speakers.
• 56:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: enormous banks of them on both sides broadcasting across the zone.
• 56:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The southern broadcasts carried news where the reports about the south, pop music, and statements about life in a free country.
• 56:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The northern broadcasts carried martial music, denunciations, and appeals to southern soldiers.
• 56:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: At times the volume was such that the sound carried for miles into the countryside on both sides night after night, which was partly the point, sleep deprivation as foreign policy.
• 57:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: These loudspeakers have been switched on and off repeatedly over the decades as a barometer of relations taken down entirely during warm periods and rebuilt within weeks during cold ones.
• 57:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: the 18th of August, 1976.
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the day that defines the place.
• 57:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the joint security area, the southern side maintained a small outpost called checkpoint three, which sat near the bridge of no return, close to the northern side and somewhat isolated.
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Observation
• 57:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: between the two of them stood a large poplar tree.
• 57:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: In summer the tree was in full leaf and the leaves blocked the line of sight, meaning the guard post could not see the checkpoint it was supposed to be watching.
• 58:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: This had been a recognized problem for a while, an earlier attempt to trim it had been abandoned after northern objections.
• 58:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: On that morning, a work detail went out to prune the tree.
• 58:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was five South Korean workmen with axes, escorted by a small group of American and South Korean soldiers.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: In command was Captain Arthur Boniface.
• 58:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: a West Point graduate and a father of three who was due to rotate home in three days.
• 58:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: With him was first lieutenant Mark Barrett.
• 58:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within a few minutes, North Korean soldiers arrived.
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Led by an officer the Americans had nicknamed Lieutenant Bulldog for his previous aggressive behaviour whose name was Pack Chul.
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: At first he watched, then he told them to stop.
• 58:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: saying the tree had been planted by Kim Il-sung himself, and was therefore not to be touched.
• 59:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Boniface told the detail to keep working.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A truck arrived with about 20 more North Korean soldiers.
• 59:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pak Chul took off his watch and wrapped it in a hankachief, which the Americans later understood as a signal.
• 59:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He shouted an order.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The North Korean soldiers attacked.
• 59:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They knocked Boniface to the ground and beat him.
• 59:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some picked up the axes the workmen had dropped.
• 59:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the space of a few minutes, Captain Boniface was killed and left tenant Barrett was fatally wounded.
• 59:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: His body not recovered for some time.
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Several other soldiers were injured.
• 59:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The whole thing lasted perhaps 20 to 30 seconds of real violence.
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it was filmed partly from a nearby observation post, which meant there was no ambiguity about what had happened.
• 59:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reaction in Washington and Seoul was fury and something close to panic.
• 1:00:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two officers had been murdered with axes in a neutral zone in front of cameras.
• 1:00:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The question immediately became how to respond without starting a war.
• 1:00:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the answer was one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of force ever mounted over a piece of vegetation.
• 1:00:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three days later, on the 21st of August, 1976, the United States and South Korea executed Operation Paul Bunion.
• 1:00:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stated objective was to cut down the tree.
• 1:00:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is what was assembled to cut down the tree.
• 1:00:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A convoy of 23 vehicles carrying a team of military engineers with chain source, a security platoon.
• 1:00:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: a company of South Korean special forces who, by most accounts, had been trained in Taekwondo and who had concealed weapons and who reportedly made a considerable performance of their martial arts skills in view of the northern guards.
• 1:01:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Overhead, a flight of attack helicopters, above them, a formation of fighter aircraft, above those, more fighters and further out,
• 1:01:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: flying visibly escorted.
• 1:01:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Offshore, the aircraft carrier midway with its battle group.
• 1:01:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the ground beyond the zone, artillery batteries were laid onto targets.
• 1:01:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Missile units were brought to readiness and forces across South Korea went to an elevated alert condition.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Infantry
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then some engineers with chain-saws cut down a tree.
• 1:01:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took about 42 minutes.
• 1:01:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They cut the tree but deliberately left a stump about six meters tall as a marker.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: work parties also removed two barriers the northern side had placed in the area.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korean soldiers watched from a distance and did not intervene.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later that day, something unprecedented happened, a message came from Kim Il Sung himself, delivered through the Military Armistice Commission, expressing regret over the incident.
• 1:02:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not an apology in the full sense,
• 1:02:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: but for North Korea to express regret for anything at all was close to unheard of, and it was accepted as a way of closing the episode.
• 1:02:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was one lasting consequence, and it changed the character of the place permanently.
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until 1976, soldiers from both sides had moved freely throughout the joint security area.
• 1:02:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The whole point of the area was that it was jointly administered,
• 1:02:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: the two sides agreed to divide it.
• 1:02:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: From then on, each side would stay on its own side of the military demarcation line within the area.
• 1:03:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that little raised concrete strip across the courtyard became a hard boundary.
• 1:03:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The free mingling ended.
• 1:03:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The face to face stand off, we know from photographs.
• 1:03:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two soldiers, a few feet apart, each pin to his own side of the line is a product of the ax murders.
• 1:03:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stump of the popular was eventually removed and replaced with a stone monument.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Camp Kitty Hawk, the small base at the entrance to the area, was renamed Camp Boniface.
• 1:03:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The joint security area went on generating incidents.
• 1:03:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: In November of 1984, a young Soviet citizen named Vasily Matuzok,
• 1:03:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: walk to the edge of the courtyard, and then sprinted south across the line, shouting for protection.
• 1:03:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korean soldiers chased him across the border, firing, and a firefight broke out in the middle of the courtyard.
• 1:04:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: that killed one South Korean soldier and three North Korean soldiers before a ceasefire was arranged.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Matuzok was granted asylum.
• 1:04:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In November of 2017, a North Korean soldier named O-chong Song drove a Jeep toward the line, crashed it, and ran on foot across the border, while his former
• 1:04:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hitting him at least five times.
• 1:04:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was dragged to safety by South Korean soldiers calling on their stomachs and was saved by a South Korean trauma surgeon who, among other things, found that he was carrying a startling number of intestinal parasites.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: A detail that became a small international news story about conditions in the northern arm.
• 1:04:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for a stretch of years, the truce village became something else entirely, the stage for peace, but we will come to that.
• 1:05:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4 What lies beneath On a cold morning in November of 1974, a South Korean patrol was moving along the southern
• 1:05:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: When one of the soldiers noticed steam rising out of the ground in a paddy field, not smoke.
• 1:05:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Steam, drifting up through the frozen soil, the way warm air does when it meets cold air.
• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They investigated.
• 1:05:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Underneath was a tunnel.
• 1:05:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was about 1.2 meters high and about the same across, lined in places with concrete slabs, wired for electricity, fitted with a narrow rail line for cards, and equipped with weapons, storage areas and sleeping space.
• 1:06:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It ran from the north under the military demarcation line.
• 1:06:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: and extended more than a kilometer into southern territory.
• 1:06:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the investigation, the tunnel was booby-tripped, and an explosion killed a South Korean officer and an American naval officer who were part of the inspection team.
• 1:06:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: This became known as the first tunnel of aggression, and its discovery began one of the strangest and most persistent subplots
• 1:06:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: the second tunnel.
• 1:06:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: was found in March of 1975 near Chau-1 in the central sector.
• 1:06:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was considerably more ambitious than the first.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was cut through solid granite at a depth of about 50 to 160 meters, about 2 meters high and 2 meters wide, running roughly 3.5 kilometers in total, with about 1 kilometer of its south of the line.
• 1:07:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: big enough that engineers estimated it could move something on the order of 30,000 soldiers an hour, along with artillery pieces broken down for transport.
• 1:07:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The third tunnel found in October of 1978 is the one most visitors to Korea have actually walked in.
• 1:07:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was located after a North Korean defector.
• 1:07:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: an engineer who had worked on tunnel construction, described the project to southern intelligence, and the search involved drilling a grid of boreholes filled with water in a suspected area and waiting to see which one was disturbed by a blast below.
• 1:07:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: When one of the pipes erupted, they had it.
• 1:07:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The third tunnel runs about 1,635 meters, sits about 73 meters below the surface, and, alarmingly, its southern end is only about 44 kilometers from Seoul.
• 1:08:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was discovered barely a year after the second.
• 1:08:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: When confronted, North Korea's explanation was that it was a coal mine, and in support of that claim, someone had painted the granite walls black.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no coal in that granite, the paint is still visible.
• 1:08:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fourth tunnel was found in March of 1990, in the eastern sector near Yangu, about 145
• 1:08:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: at a depth of about 145 meters and built to roughly the same dimensions as the second and third.
• 1:08:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Four tunnels found.
• 1:08:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The South Korean government has investigated a great many reports of others and believes more exist.
• 1:08:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: With estimates over the years running from a handful to more than a dozen, there is a persistent subculture of private tunnel hunters in South Korea.
• 1:09:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them retired officers who spend years drilling on their own land and petitioning the government to investigate.
• 1:09:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing further has been officially confirmed since 1990.
• 1:09:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The tunnels tell you something about how North Korea thought about the problem in front of it.
• 1:09:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The demilitarized zone is from a military standpoint, an extremely difficult thing to attack across.
• 1:09:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is heavily mined, thoroughly observed, covered by artillery, and backed on the southern side by one of the most heavily prepared defensive lines on earth.
• 1:09:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But underneath it is granite, and granite can be drilled, and a tunnel that emerges behind the defensive line delivers troops where the defensive line is not.
• 1:10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were not smuggling routes or escape routes.
• 1:10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are wide, straight, and equipped for volume angled slightly upward toward the south so that groundwater drains back to the north.
• 1:10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: they were infiltration corridors for the opening hours of a war, which is a good moment to say plainly that the decades after the armistice were not peaceful.
• 1:10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: We tend to imagine the cold war in Korea as a frozen standoff punctuated by the occasional headline.
• 1:10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the 1960s in particular were close to a low-grade war, and the casualty figures are not trivial.
• 1:10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Between roughly 1966 and 1969, in a period sometimes called the second Korean conflict, or the demilitarized zone conflict.
• 1:10:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were hundreds of armed incidents along the line, dozens of American soldiers, and a much larger number of South Korean soldiers were killed, along with a large number of North Korean infiltrators.
• 1:11:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most spectacular episode came in January of 1968.
• 1:11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 21st of that month, a 31-man commando team from a North Korean special unit, Unit 124, cut through the fence, crossed the zone, and walked south for days through the winter hills, wearing South Korean army uniforms.
• 1:11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their objective was the blue house, the residents of the South
• 1:11:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: was to kill Park Chung-hee.
• 1:11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: They got within a few hundred meters of it before being stopped at a checkpoint in Seoul, where a nervous exchange with police turned into a firefight.
• 1:11:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the manhunt that followed, most of the team was killed.
• 1:11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: One was captured.
• 1:11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He later defected fully, became a South Korean citizen, and decades on, a Christian minister.
• 1:12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: At least one is believed to have made it back north, where he reportedly went on to a senior military career.
• 1:12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two days later, on the 23rd of January 1968, North Korean patrol boats and aircraft seized
• 1:12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: One crewman was killed, the remaining 82 were held for 11 months, beaten, paraded for propaganda photographs, and finally released only after the United States signed a document, admitting to spying.
• 1:12:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: While simultaneously announcing that the admission was false and signed under duress, the Pueblo itself was never returned.
• 1:12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is more than Pyongyang as a museum, and it remains technically
• 1:12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy, which gives it the distinction of being the only commissioned American warship currently held by a foreign power.
• 1:13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Later that same year, in the autumn, more than 100 North Korean commandos landed by sea on the east coast near
• 1:13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: to try to establish guerrilla bases in the mountains.
• 1:13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They failed, and the sweep that eliminated them ran for months and cost dozens of South Korean lives, including in one of the incident seared into South Korean memory, a nine-year-old boy who was killed after refusing to cooperate with the infiltrators.
• 1:13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1969, North Korean fighters shot down an American reconnaissance aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 men aboard.
• 1:13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1976, there were the Axe murders.
• 1:13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1983,
• 1:13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korean agents planted bombs in Rangoon, in Burma, targeting the visiting South Korean President.
• 1:14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was late and survived.
• 1:14:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But 21 people were killed, including four senior South Korean cabinet officials.
• 1:14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1987, two North Korean agents planted a bomb aboard a Korean air flight, destroying it over the Andaman Sea and killing all 115 people aboard.
• 1:14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In what was understood as an attempt to frighten countries away from attending the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
• 1:14:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the two agents, Kim Hyun-hui,
• 1:14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and pardoned.
• 1:14:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the record the two careers were building while the lines sat there looking in photographs so still and yet.
• 1:14:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here is the thing about the demilitarized zone that nobody planned and nobody could have predicted for more than 70 years.
• 1:15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: across a strip of land four kilometers wide and 250 kilometers long.
• 1:15:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roughly a thousand square kilometers in total.
• 1:15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost no human being has walked.
• 1:15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are guard posts and patrol routes and cleared fire breaks.
• 1:15:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the great bulk of the interior is off limits to everyone, permanently, because it is full of land mines.
• 1:15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Estimates of the number of mines inside and immediately around the zone run into the hundreds of thousands and by some counts into the millions.
• 1:15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody knows precisely, many were laid decades ago, in soil that shifts on hillsides that erode, and monsoon flooding has repeatedly washed mines downstream into farmland and
• 1:16:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The consequence of all that lethality is a paradox that ecologists find almost painful to describe.
• 1:16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The demilitarized zone has become one of the best preserved pieces of temperate habitat in Asia.
• 1:16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: While South Korea industrialized at extraordinary speed and North Korea stripped its own hillside's bear for fuel and farmland, the strip in between simply sat there, ungraced, unlogged, unfarmed, unvisited,
• 1:16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Surveys have identified thousands of species of plants and animals in and around the zone, including dozens that are endangered or protected.
• 1:16:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Red crowned cranes and white-naked cranes winter in the wetlands near the Han and Imgenes trees, feeding in old rice fields that nobody harvests anymore.
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are agiatic black bears, musk deer, the long-tailed coral, otters, and an enormous number of migratory birds.
• 1:17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is credible speculation, though no confirmation, about the presence of the Amur leopard.
• 1:17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There have been persistent, unconfirmed reports of Siberian tigers, which is almost certainly wishful thinking.
• 1:17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the zone is exactly the kind of place where wishful thinking survives.
• 1:17:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because nobody can go in and check, conservationists have proposed for decades that the whole strip be designated a peace park, a transboundary biosphere reserve, protected permanently,
• 1:17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: if the political situation ever allows.
• 1:17:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korea has built a network of parks, observatories, and trails along the southern edge, and the border counties market themselves as ecotourism destinations.
• 1:17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tourists ride to observatories and look through coin-operated binoculars at North Korean hillside and at the empty village with the enormous flag.
• 1:18:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is one more thing worth saying about the zone as a physical place, and it is the thing that visitors most often report as the part that stays with them afterward.
• 1:18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is quiet, not silent.
• 1:18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are birds, wind in the grass, occasionally the crackle of a loud speaker in the distance, sometimes the sound of a public address system carrying across from the north.
• 1:18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the ordinary background noise of the modern Korean peninsula, which is one of the most densely populated, heavily engineered, brightly lit, relentlessly busy landscapes on the planet, simply stops.
• 1:18:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can stand at an observatory above the western sector and look out over an enormous stretch of green country with no roads,
• 1:18:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: no houses, no people, and no lights at night, and it looks like an old photograph of Korea before any of this happened, which in a sense is exactly what it is.
• 1:19:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: A strip of the 1950s preserved in place by fear, one accidental national park, four kilometres wide, running from sea to sea, held open by two million landmines, and a piece of paper that was supposed to
• 1:19:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5.
• 1:19:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two countries that were one country.
• 1:19:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Take two halves of the same nation.
• 1:19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Give them the same language, the same cuisine, the same family names, the same thousand years of shared kings and poets and wars.
• 1:19:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Draw a line between them in 30 minutes with a
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: start with the north because in the 1950s and 1960s the north was winning.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: That sounds strange now and it is worth sitting with.
• 1:20:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea inherited the industry, the mines, the hydroelectric dams.
• 1:20:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It rebuilt from the rubble of the bombing campaign.
• 1:20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: with substantial Soviet and Chinese aid and it rebuilt fast through the 1960s by most measures available at the time.
• 1:20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea had a higher standard of living and greater industrial output per person than the South.
• 1:20:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Visitors from developing countries were taken on tours.
• 1:20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korea in the same years was one of the poorest countries in the world.
• 1:20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: dependent on American aid, governed after 1961 by a military government under Park Chung-hee, who had taken power in a coup.
• 1:20:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ideology that took hold in the north was called Ju-sh, usually translated as self-reliance.
• 1:20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It began as a nationalist reworking of Marxism, Leninism, and grew over decades into something else.
• 1:21:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: a system organised entirely around the person of Kim Il Sung, who became the great leader, then the eternal president, a title he holds to this day, despite having died in 1994.
• 1:21:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: His birthday became the calendar's starting point.
• 1:21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea counts years from 1912, so that what the rest of the world calls 2,026 is there, year 115, portraits of the leaders hang in every home, and are required to be kept clean.
• 1:21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Citizens are sorted from birth into a hereditary classification of loyalty, called Songbun, based on what their grandparents did during the colonial period in the war.
• 1:21:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that classification shapes where they can live, what they can study, and what work they can do.
• 1:21:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: power passed to his son, Kim Jong Il, on his death in 1994, which made North Korea the first communist state to manage a hereditary succession.
• 1:22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It passed again in 2011 to his grandson, Kim Jong Un.
• 1:22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The turning point was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• 1:22:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea's economy had been built on subsidized Soviet oil and barter trade with the socialist
• 1:22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when that vanished at the start of the 1990s, the whole system seized, factory stopped.
• 1:22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fertilizer production stopped, which meant harvest fell, on land that had been farmed with industrial intensity.
• 1:22:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then came floods in 1995 and 1996 and drought.
• 1:22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The state distribution system, which was how most people got their food, broke down.
• 1:22:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The famine that followed,
• 1:22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: which North Korea calls the Arduous March, ran from about 1994 to 1998.
• 1:23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Estimates of the death toll vary enormously, from a few hundred thousand to well over two million, and no one will ever have a firm number.
• 1:23:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is clear is that a modern, urbanized, literate society experienced mass starvation, and that the way people survived it was by ignoring the state.
• 1:23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: by trading illegally, foraging, crossing into China and creating informal markets.
• 1:23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those markets, called Zhang Madang, never went away.
• 1:23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: They became the real economy, and one of the quiet stories of North Korea in the 21st century is the state's long grudging accommodation with the private trading it never intended to permit.
• 1:23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other response was military.
• 1:23:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The policy of Song Gun, military first, placed the armed forces at the center of national life and the nuclear program moved to the front.
• 1:24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006 and further tests in 2009, 2013, twice in 2016 and in 2017, the last of these by a wide margin, the largest.
• 1:24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its missile programs advanced from short range systems to intercontinental ballistic missiles tested on high lofted trajectories and to solid fuel designs that are far harder to detect before launch.
• 1:24:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The calculation is not mysterious.
• 1:24:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leaders in Pyongyang watched what happened to governments that gave up unconventional weapons programs and drew the obvious conclusion.
• 1:24:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, look south.
• 1:24:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korea, in 1960, had a per capita income comparable to the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
• 1:25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had almost no natural resources.
• 1:25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had been flattened.
• 1:25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Under Park Chung-hee's authoritarian government, it pursued export-led industrialization with enormous state direction, shipbuilding, steel, chemicals, then electronics, channeled through large family-controlled conglomerates called Chable.
• 1:25:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: names now known everywhere.
• 1:25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Growth ran at extraordinary rates for three decades, a period often called the miracle on the Han River.
• 1:25:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The political cost was real and should not be glossed over.
• 1:25:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The South was a dictatorship for most of that period.
• 1:25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Park ruled until he was assassinated by his own intelligence chief in 1979.
• 1:25:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another general seized power, and in May of 1980, in the city of Guangzhou, an uprising was put down by paratroopers with hundreds of deaths.
• 1:26:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Democracy came only in 1987, after sustained mass protest forced direct presidential elections, and it came fast once it came.
• 1:26:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within a year, Seoul was hosting the Olympic Games, the result by the 2020s.
• 1:26:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: is one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced societies on Earth.
• 1:26:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korea builds ships and semiconductors and automobiles.
• 1:26:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exports its music and film and television to a global audience and has a per capita income in the same league as Western Europe.
• 1:26:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its economy is depending on how you measure, somewhere between 50 to 50 years.
• 1:26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: and 60 times the size of North Korea's.
• 1:26:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a population about twice as large, two halves of one people, one with the highest broadband speeds in the world, and one where satellite photographs at night show a black space between the lights of China and the lights of South Korea, with a single small smudge
• 1:27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Korean absorbed an enormous vocabulary of English loan words.
• 1:27:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korean deliberately purged foreign borrowings and invented native replacements.
• 1:27:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spelling conventions differ.
• 1:27:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some words changed meaning.
• 1:27:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Defectors arriving in the south, routinely reports struggling with ordinary conversations.
• 1:27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the South Korean government funds programs to help them adjust, including translation dictionaries between two dialects of the same language.
• 1:27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Linguists estimate that a meaningful share of everyday professional vocabulary now differs outright.
• 1:27:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Against all of that, there were real attempts at reconciliation and they were not nothing.
• 1:27:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2000,
• 1:27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Kim Day Jung, who had himself been kidnapped and nearly killed by his own country's intelligence service in an earlier era, flew to Pyongyang and met Kim Jong-il.
• 1:28:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the first sum in between the two careers ever.
• 1:28:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the centerpiece of what was called the sunshine policy.
• 1:28:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The argument that engagement and economic ties would soften the north over time.
• 1:28:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kim Dayjung received the Nobel Peace Prize.
• 1:28:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Out of that period came the K-Song Industrial Complex, an extraordinary experiment in which South Korean companies operated factories just inside North Korea, employing more than 50,000 North Korean workers, and tourist visits to Mount Cumbgang on the northern east coast.
• 1:28:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: and out of it came the family reunions.
• 1:28:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brief, heavily managed meetings at which elderly people separated since 1950 were allowed to see siblings and parents and children for a few hours.
• 1:29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The footage of those reunions is almost impossible to watch dry-eyed.
• 1:29:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The people in their 80s and 90s, holding photographs, trying to recognize a face they last saw when it was 20 years old.
• 1:29:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than 20 rounds of reunions were held.
• 1:29:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well over 100,000 South Koreans registered for them.
• 1:29:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The great majority died waiting.
• 1:29:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a second summit in 2007.
• 1:29:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: After a South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean guard.
• 1:29:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 2010, came the sinking of the chonan and the shelling of Yom Pyong Island.
• 1:29:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, remarkably, 2018, it began with the winter Olympics at Pyongchang.
• 1:30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: where the two careers marched under a unification flag and fielded a joint women's ice hockey team.
• 1:30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April, Kim Jong-un walked across that raised concrete strip in the joint security area and shook hands with President Moon Jae-in.
• 1:30:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first time a North Korean leader had ever set foot in the south.
• 1:30:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They walked to a footbridge and talked for half an hour with no aids present.
• 1:30:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They signed the Panmunjom Declaration, promising to work toward a formal end to the war.
• 1:30:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: That September came the comprehensive military agreement, and for a while it genuinely changed the line.
• 1:30:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: land mines around the joint security area were cleared.
• 1:30:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Firearms were removed from the truce village and the guard details were reduced.
• 1:31:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: a no-fly zone was established along the border.
• 1:31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers from both sides worked together briefly on the joint excavation of war remains.
• 1:31:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the first time since 1953, parts of the demilitarized zone were actually becoming demilitarized.
• 1:31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were summits between Kim Jong-un and President Donald Trump in Singapore in 2018 and in Hanoi in 2019, the second ending with no agreement.
• 1:31:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, in June of 2019, in one of the most photographed moments in the history of the place.
• 1:31:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trump met Kim at Panmunjom and stepped across the line, becoming the first sitting American president to set foot in North Korea.
• 1:31:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They stood on the northern side for a few moments and came back.
• 1:31:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not hold.
• 1:32:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The talk stalled over what sanctions relief would be exchanged for what dismantlement.
• 1:32:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: North Korea sealed itself off almost completely during the pandemic, closing even its border with China.
• 1:32:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June of 2020, Pyongyang blew up the inter-Korean liaison office in K-Song, a building South Korea had paid for, and the demolition was filmed and broadcast.
• 1:32:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then came the decisive turn.
• 1:32:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the relationship between the two careers was no longer that of Kinsman destined for reunification.
• 1:32:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that of two hostile states at war.
• 1:32:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like rhetoric.
• 1:32:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not.
• 1:32:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a structural change.
• 1:32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Agencies devoted to reunification were abolished.
• 1:32:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: References to reunification were removed from official language.
• 1:33:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The arch of reunification in Pyongyang.
• 1:33:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A monument built to commemorate his grandfather's proposals for a unified career was demolished.
• 1:33:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: In October of 2024, North Korea blew up sections of the road and rail links to the south that had been built during the warm years with the cameras rolling.
• 1:33:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: and along the line itself, from the spring of 2024 onward, North Korean work parties began a steady program of fortification, clearing vegetation, laying mines, stringing wire.
• 1:33:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: building anti-tank obstacles and cutting tactical roads inside the zone.
• 1:33:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Satellite imagery in 2026 showed some of these works running close to and in places possibly across the military demarcation line itself.
• 1:33:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The aim, as South Korean analysts read it, is to convert what was a buffer into a hard, national frontier, consistent with the two hostile states' position.
• 1:34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The loudspeakers came back to, along with a genuinely bizarre episode in which North Korea floated thousands of balloons south carrying bags of refuse, and South Korean activists floated
• 1:34:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: and both governments found themselves conducting foreign policy by party balloon.
• 1:34:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where things stand as this is recorded in the autumn of 2026 is a peculiar asymmetry.
• 1:34:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The South Korean government under President Lee J. M. Young, in office since the middle of 2025, has pursued deliberate de-escalation, suspending the loudspeaker broadcasts.
• 1:34:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: restricting the leaflet launches, scaling back some joint military exercises with the United States and easing restrictions on inter-Korean contact.
• 1:35:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pyongyang has so far declined to engage and has continued fortifying the border.
• 1:35:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both things are true at once.
• 1:35:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: One side is reaching and the other is digging.
• 1:35:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the line drawn in 30 minutes on a national geographic map to solve a temporary administrative problem about who would accept a Japanese surrender has now outlasted the Soviet Union that accepted it.
• 1:35:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two kernels who drew it and the founding leaders of both states it created.
• 1:35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has been in place longer than the Berlin Wall Stood, several times over.
• 1:35:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Berlin's Wall lasted 28 years.
• 1:35:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: This one is past 73.
• 1:35:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this long, slow stretch of the night with me.
• 1:35:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.
• 1:35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sleep well, and I will see you next time.