SEOUL -- For over 50 years, South Koreans have lived with the knowledge that North Korea could pound their capital with artillery shells and rockets. So the North's missile tests drew muted reactions from many Southerners, despite their vulnerability to attack.

South Korea delivered somber warnings that the tests on Wednesday posed a threat to inter-Korean exchanges as well as regional stability, but the ambivalence of some citizens in Seoul showed how much the relationship between the North and South has softened in recent years.

It also highlighted a widely held view that the United States, South Korea's closest ally, is as much or more of a threat to stability on the Korean Peninsula than the regime in Pyongyang.

"I think the North's missile launches can be somewhat justified in the sense that the U.S. turned a deaf ear to its continuous requests to have one-to-one dialogue," Im Chae-sung, a 40-year-old office worker, said Thursday. "I feel the U.S. has pushed the reclusive country into a dead end."

Kwon Soon-hyung, a 22 year-old college student, said he recognized that the missile launches could have a destabilizing effect, but said South Korea wasn't in crisis.

"Even when I talked to my friend in military service, he said his military unit didn't take any special countermeasures in the wake of the North's acts," Kwon said. "But I do feel the need to be more aware of national security issues since most South Koreans live in oblivion."

South Korea once sought to undermine North Korea, rather than co-exist with it.

From the 1960s through the 1980s under the South's anti-communist military regime, children watched cartoons portraying North Korean founding ruler Kim Il Sung as a masked pig and North Korean soldiers as evil wolves. The negative portrayal stemmed from the ruin and bloodshed of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a stalemate and without a peace treaty.

The United States has about 29,500 troops stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the devastating conflict. South Korean men are required to spend about two years in military service, and the mines, tank traps and electrified fences that line the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas symbolize the potential for conflict.

"North Korea has massive combat-ready forces on the border with South Korea, long-range artillery that can hit at some 30-40 percent of South Korea's economy, massive stocks of chemical weapons, and large numbers of short-range missiles and rockets that may have chemical warheads," wrote Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Pentagon intelligence official.

But inter-Korean relations warmed considerably under former President Kim Dae-jung's sunshine policy of engaging the communist North. South Korea stepped up aid to its impoverished neighbor, backed tourist excursions to a Northern mountain resort, and promoted a joint industrial park in the North Korean city of Kaesong.

Sports and cultural exchanges also thrived, signaling a mutual yearning for reconciliation despite ideological differences and frequent spikes in political tension. The contacts often suffered delays amid a dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons program, with the United States pushing for tougher action against the North in contrast to the South's softer approach.

"Despite the chill atmosphere between North Korea and the United States, South Korea has still managed to make some headway in a peninsular thaw," John Feffer of Foreign Policy in Focus, a U.S.-based research center, wrote in an essay. But he said North-South ties are "temporarily at ebb tide."

The North Korean tests included short to medium range missiles that landed harmlessly in the sea, and U.S. officials said one test involved a long-range missile that was deemed a failure.

Many South Koreans, especially the younger generation that did not endure the hardship of the Korean War and grew up in economic boom times, view North Korea as an object of pity or curiosity rather than a threatening adversary.

North Korea has sought to drive a wedge in the alliance between the South and Washington, directing its belligerent rhetoric at the United States or Japan.

Song Kwang-yong, a 37-year-old driver in Seoul, said South Korea should not side with Japan and the United States in seeking punitive action against the North, and said a country had the right to test missiles in its national interest.

But older South Koreans who remember the Korean War said the South Korean government was too lenient.

"Its economic aid and flattery have been manipulated by the North as it pleases, and resulted in bolstering the North's military power," said 82-year-old Han Moo-hwan.

July 6, 2006

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