South Koreans are starkly divided over North Korea's nuclear threat

POHANG, South Korea -- There are two Koreas, North and South. But there's also more than one South Korea, with the nation split into camps with polar opposite views on the danger posed by the nuclear-armed neighbor to the north.

This division in South Korean sentiment has lasted through a tumultuous history of war, dictatorship, poverty and, in recent decades, head-spinning though unevenly distributed economic growth. Differing views on North Korea are now sharper than ever, influenced — or not — by Pyongyang's repeated vows to attack South Korea and its buildup of nuclear-capable weapons.

Spend some time in South Korea and you will see reminders everywhere of North Korea’s potential nuclear menace — and the contrasting ways residents read Pyongyang's actions.

Older people and conservatives often have more unease about North Korea than liberals and younger people. But a sweeping generalization isn't possible. Many young people are also afraid. And some older people who have spent their lives hearing angry warnings from North Korea feel no fear at all.

Relations with North Korea often improve with liberal South Korean governments eager for dialogue, and plummet with conservative leaders like the current hard-line president. A tough stance in Seoul usually means Pyongyang stages more weapons tests, as happened on Thursday, and issues more bellicose statements, which leads to frenzied South Korean media coverage. During the previous liberal government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had summits with then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in, which set up meetings between Kim and former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Many in South Korea discount the nuclear peril as hollow because of a simple truth: Aside from occasional deadly skirmishes, the North hasn’t backed up its vows to use its weapons in a full-scale attack on the South. Still, for South Koreans paying attention to the whiplash speed of North Korea’s nuclear and missile development, there is plenty of distress.

The Associated Press interviewed and photographed dozens of South Koreans to explain this unique, fragmented perception of the nation's biggest rival, North Korea.

“Kim Jong Un might really use a nuke,” said Kim Jaehyun, a 22-year-old undergraduate law student. “North Korea could really attack us out of the blue.”

He stockpiles a bulletproof vest and other military gear in the event of a war. While many South Koreans his age know little about national defense policies, Kim attends North Korea security seminars and reads articles on war scenarios.

Kim links his worries, in part, to the day in 2022 when, while serving as an infantryman along the border, he heard that Pyongyang had flown a drone into South Korean territory, breaking an inter-Korean military agreement.

“There needs to be at least one person like me who can raise how dangerous” North Korea is, Kim said. “People just take the looming threats too lightly. It’s like they see the knife coming closer to them but never think the knife could stab them.”

That’s not the case for Shin Nari, who can quickly quantify her worry about nuclear war.

“Number-wise, from 1 to 10, I would say 8. … I take it very seriously,” said Shin, 34, a master’s student at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. A war could happen anytime, she says. “In a few seconds, we could just blow up here.”

Shin’s bookshelves are filled with North Korea-related topics, and her goal is to work for her country as a policymaker. She has a small stockpile of bottled water and canned goods in case of a nuclear attack. “It makes me satisfied that I could live at least 14 days, maybe a month.”

South Koreans have long been divided on North Korea.

Here are some facts: The North attacked the South in June 1950, five years after Soviet and American forces split the Korean Peninsula in half at the end of World War II. The end of the Korean War in 1953 resulted in an uneasy cease-fire. This means that the Korean Peninsula, separated by the world’s most heavily armed border, is still technically at war.

Much of the unease in the South is linked to the nuclear bombs.

North Korea has been building its nuclear program for decades, but it started in earnest in the 1990s. Over the years, through on-again, off-again disarmament negotiations, the North has conducted a barrage of missile and nuclear tests. The goal is an arsenal of accurate, long-range nuclear-capable missiles.

There are still technical issues the North needs to master, but the development of such an arsenal may only be a matter of time. Pyongyang is estimated by some experts to currently have as many as 60 warheads.

Many believe Kim Jong Un won’t risk war because the United States-South Korea military alliance would respond with overwhelming force, obliterating the North's leadership. But there are growing questions in South Korea about the U.S. commitment to back up its “nuclear umbrella” protecting the South, with repeated polls showing that more than half want Seoul to build its own nukes.

Two experts who regularly visited North Korea — former senior U.S. intelligence official Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory — argued at the beginning of this year that Kim had “made a strategic decision to go to war,” creating a situation on the Korean Peninsula that's “more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950.”

“If a fish lives in water, it doesn’t think about the water,” said the Rev. Chung Joon-hee, a pastor at Youngnak Presbyterian Church in Seoul, one of South Korea’s biggest and most influential churches, explaining why many South Koreans pay little attention to North Korea.

“This is our world,” he said on a busy Sunday at his church, which was set up by a pastor born in what is now North Korea and North Korean refugees. “There is nowhere to hide or go. … If there is a provocation or anything that happens, we have to accept that as context in our life.”

Most people, Chung said, see tensions with North Korea as “just a given."

“The fact that we are divided, the fact that there is a threat up there, the fact that they can do crazy things. … Other than prayer, there is not much we can be ready for,” he said.

A vivid reminder that South Korea — for all its modern, high-tech veneer — is a country technically at war could be seen recently when hundreds of young men gathered at a military base in Pohang to begin 18 months of mandatory military service. The marine band played sentimental songs about parting from loved ones, and the young recruits, still in their civilian clothes and haircuts, knelt with their faces on the ground, to show their gratitude to friends and family in the review stands.

“I feel worried and hope he won’t get injured,” said Yeon Soo Lee, 55, a kitchenware business owner from Gangneung whose son is becoming a third-generation marine. “But I have no concern that he will be involved in a possible war that North Korea has been implying will happen these days.”

Others were also unfazed.

“I cannot say there is a zero percent chance of war, but I just don’t think of it at all. I cannot live each day full of worries,” said Kim Shin Hwa, 21, another marine recruit.

His father, Kim Jong Soo, a 56-year-old office worker, said South Koreans have become numb to the barrage of news about North Korean provocations. His reaction, when he hears that North Korea has test-fired a missile: “'Oh, they did it again.’ We pay more attention to our daily lives.”

But even the unworried know worriers.

Kim Jong Soo said his brother-in-law “is more sensitive than me” and has stockpiled bottles of water and instant noodles in case of a war.

Kwon Young-il, a 28-year-old car seller who completed his active duty in the military in 2021 and is now in the reserves, isn't concerned about war.

What does he worry about? “Whether I should get a lunch box provided by the army or buy my own lunch at the post exchange,” he said of his reserve training. “None of my friends seriously think I will have to fight against North Korea.”

Gauging South Korean opinion on the North is notoriously difficult.

Publicly, South Koreans tend to be nonchalant about a danger that has been around their entire lives. Some feel that North Korea is working from a tried-and-true playbook where it repeatedly raises tensions with weapons demonstrations and belligerent rhetoric in order to lay the groundwork for negotiations meant to win concessions. Others have an abiding faith in Washington’s rhetoric about its “ironclad alliance” with Seoul. But there is a great deal of apprehension, too.

A 2023 telephone survey of 1,001 adults in South Korea showed that 45% worried about North Korea’s nuclear program while 30% said they didn’t, according to the state-funded Korea Institute for National Unification, which commissioned the survey.

Alarm spikes after big provocations, like North Korean nuke tests.

In 1994, panicked crowds emptied stores of instant ramen and rice after a North Korean negotiator threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire.” South Koreans have since gotten used to that language.

Another thing that plays into North Korean nuclear anxiety in Seoul is Trump.

The former U.S. president repeatedly questioned the decades-long Seoul-Washington alliance. This, along with the North’s rapid progress on nuclear-tipped missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland, has raised serious questions in Seoul about whether Washington would fulfill its oft-stated pledge to respond with its own nuclear weapons if the North attacked South Korea.

U.S. officials maintain they would instantly hit back if North Korea attacked. There are nearly 30,000 American troops in South Korea and another 50,000 in nearby Japan.

In a recent speech, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol laid out a vision that “clearly rejects the legitimacy of the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’ (North Korea’s formal name) and the idea of unification through a gradual process of integration and extensive cross-border cooperation,” according to Daniel Sneider, an East Asia expert at Stanford University.

“The warring visions of unification offered by President Yoon and North Korean leader Kim” — who wants a Korea ruled by Pyongyang — “are likely to lead to even greater inter-Korean tensions,” Sneider wrote.

After North Korea launched a satellite into orbit in November — which Seoul and Washington viewed as a disguised test of long-range missile technology — and the Seoul city government sent out evacuation alerts erroneously, Jung Myungja made a big decision: "It would be such a relief to have a place nearby for my family members to hide.”

So the 73-year-old hired a company to dig a bunker, about the size of a medium-sized walk-in closet, below the courtyard of her house on the outskirts of Seoul.

Her son-in-law, Park Seung Tae, a 45-year-old office worker, said the bunker could protect the family for a week or two “if a nuke is ever dropped here.”

The company that built the bunker has secured three other such contracts and just started construction on one in eastern Seoul. Similar bunkers take about a month to build and cost up to 40 million Korean won ($30,000), the company says.

“You never know what the future holds,” Jung said. “These days you get local news and (expert) opinions that say there is likely going to be another war in this country. I personally think that can really happen again.”

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Associated Press writer Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul contributed.

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