“North Korean provocation is always a concern, but it is kind of like background noise,” says Abraham Kim, former vice president of the Korea Economic Institute of America in Washington, D.C., and current director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana. “Sometimes it gets very loud, but it’s always been there. People are kind of numb to it.”
That’s particularly the case among younger residents of Seoul. For them, the prospect of conflict feels hypothetical, says Walter Paik, chair of the Department of Military Force at Korea Tourism University in Incheon. “They don’t know the reality of the North Korean leaders.” [...]
It’s hard to overstate the importance of Seoul to South Korea. More than half of South Korea’s 50 million residents live in the Seoul metropolitan area—more than 10 million in the city itself—and approximately 70 percent of the country’s economy is tied to the city. It’s also hard to overstate its vulnerability. Decades before North Korea became a nuclear threat to the rest of the world, the city lay in the crosshairs of North Korean conventional artillery, minutes away from its jets. [...]
But Bong says rather than stockpiling ramen, the young generation in Seoul is “aware of the possibility of the government potentially manipulating the security issues in order to restrain civic liberty, which happened during the era of (South Korean) military dictatorship.”
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