Security issues knocking on South Korea’s door

A North Korean soldier slipped across the DMZ the night of 2 October, getting through a fence on the North’s side, followed by an electrified fence, then a barbed-wire-topped South Korean fence, before finally … walking up to a South Korean army barracks door and knocking, telling the soldiers inside he wanted to defect.



Until he literally knocked on the front door, no one in the South had detected his presence – a problem that is getting a great deal of attention in the South Korean press (a brief story in English here, a longer summary in Korean here, an editorial complaining of the situation here).



Coming so soon after another man swam across the border undetected, only to be discovered drunk and half-naked after breaking into someone’s home and stealing their soju, serious questions are being raised in the SK media about the security of the South’s border with the North.



Coming only a year after the South installed a pricey new electronic monitoring and information collection system along the border, the two lapses in security raise questions about the ease with which the North can infiltrate the South. As the editorial said, it was lucky the North Korean soldier came to defect, had he been armed and bent on creating trouble, the outcome for the soldiers in that barracks would have been far worse.


2 thoughts on “Security issues knocking on South Korea’s door”

    1. Thank you professor. I’ve followed your work and enjoyed your comments on the Korea Studies mailing list for years. Glad to make your acquaintance too.

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