Shaky North Korea stirs fear in the South

Seoul, Oct 14: Whether through war or peace, South Koreans have a great deal to fear from their Northern neighbours.

North Korea could obliterate Seoul quickly with conventional arms, while peaceful reunification of the peninsula could leave South Korea's economy in chaos due to the massive cost of rebuilding the impoverished North.

''The main thing people worry about is filling the economic gap between North and South Korea after unification. We cannot leave North Korea like it is,'' said Kim Young-yoon, an analyst at Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU).

Experts estimate the costs of reunification at anywhere from 200 billion dollars to 1.86 trillion dollars over a 10-year period, according to figures compiled from various sources by KINU.

''Even at the lower end of the scale, the amount would still create an enormous burden for the average South Korean,'' the institute said in a 2004 report.

South Koreans struggled to build their economy out of the ashes of the 1950-1953 Korean War, and paid close attention to the high costs of uniting East and West Germany, economically much less far apart than the two Koreas.

For a while after the war, the North had the more powerful economy but decades of central planning turned it into a basket case. In 2005 South Korea had a gross domestic product of 787.6 billion dollars, about 33 times bigger than North Korea's.

The differences between the two economies are staggering. South Korea's exports are about 250 times greater, it produces 45 times more steel and 770 times more cars, Seoul's Bank of Korea says.

Eventually South Korean companies may benefit from cheap labour and land in the North in a reunified peninsula, but it will take a colossal investment to build the roads, lay the sewerage pipes and string the electric lines needed to connect those factories to the South.

And the cost of teaching workers from the communist North to be as nimble as those in the capitalist South will also be huge.

Quick and Costly War

South Koreans were shaken by North Korea's announcement on Monday that it had tested a nuclear weapon.

But they have lived for decades with the fear that a relatively basic weapons system, a rain of artillery, would be the North's most effective way to hit the South fast and hard.

Seoul's Defence Ministry said North Korea has amassed more than 13,000 pieces of artillery and multiple rocket launchers, most of them aimed at the vast sprawling Southern capital, some 50 km (30 miles) from the border.

Jane's International Defence Review estimates that if North Korea launched an all-out barrage, it could achieve an initial fire rate of 300,000 to 500,000 shells per hour into the Seoul area -- home to about half of South Korea's 48.5 million people.

''Any major military move could encourage a stern response from North Korea, with a potentially devastating effect on the South,'' said Christian Le Meire, Asia-Pacific editor for Jane's Country Risk.

North Korea keeps most of its 1.2-million-man army near the border, and has hundreds of missiles capable of hitting all big South Korean urban centres out of artillery range.

Though technically still at war, the two Koreas have eased tensions over the past several years through greater engagement.

However, according to a poll taken just after a defiant North Korea test-launched missiles in July, only 12 per cent of South Koreans thought unification was an absolute necessity, down seven percentage points from a year earlier.

Reuters